The Social Democrats’ attempt to amend the 2018 abortion legislation was resoundingly defeated. Although media coverage focused on the three-day reflection period for women seeking abortion, the Bill would also have widened the grounds for abortion for life-limiting conditions.
The current legislation states that an abortion can be carried out after two medical practitioners decide there is a condition “that is likely to lead to the death of the foetus either before, or within 28 days of, birth.”
The Bill would have removed the requirement for two medical practitioners and inserted that “there is present a fatal condition affecting the foetus”. This definition is ludicrously broad and reckless.
It is already increasingly difficult to predict the length of survival, even for babies with life-limiting conditions such as Trisomy 13 and Trisomy 18. One 2015 study of 693 children with T13 and 1,113 children with T18 found that for T13, nearly one in 10 is still alive aged five, while with T18, it is even higher at 12.3 per cent.
READ MORE
This allegedly progressive Bill would have institutionalised even greater discrimination against babies with life-limiting conditions. The Social Democrats prefer the dehumanising terms “fatal foetal anomaly” or “abnormality”, which is not a medical description.
The Bill also sought to remove criminal sanctions for medical practitioners. As Sinn Féin’s David Cullinane pointed out, given the long history of scandals involving women’s healthcare, this is extremely unwise. Lest anyone think that Sinn Féin have become pro-life heroes because they abstained from voting, the party has its own Bill to remove the three-day reflection period.
Waiting periods are not unusual. Belgium mandates a six-day wait before an abortion. French law no longer has a mandatory seven-day waiting period, but still requires at least two consultations.
Three months’ notice to the Irish State is required to get married, but no one moans about it being paternalistic and patronising. Surely 72 hours is not too long to wait to make a decision that, unlike marriage, is completely irrevocable?
Leader of the Social Democrats Holly Cairns says that there is no scientific evidence that the three-day waiting period reduces abortions. She also that it is a barrier to access. If it does not reduce abortions, how can it be a barrier to access?
Do we want even more abortions than the almost 50,000 we have had since 2019, according to Government figures?
HSE data released to Carol Nolan TD shows that one in six women who had an initial consultation did not return for an abortion, some 10,426 women between 2019 and 2024. Some may sadly have miscarried but it is unlikely that 10,426 women miscarried in the three-day waiting period. The suggestion that many may have ordered illegal abortion pills online doesn’t stack up either since the pills would probably take more than three days to arrive.
The removal of the three-day waiting period was recommended by the O’Shea three-year review of the 2018 legislation. The recommendation might have had more credibility if the review had engaged with the HSE data instead of choosing to cite instead a nonrepresentative sample of 475 women surveyed by the Southern Taskforce on Abortion and Reproductive Topics, which found that only 2 per cent of women failed to return for a second consultation. Marie O’Shea spoke to three service users, but not to a woman who did not return, an extraordinary omission. Is it the case that we must listen to women’s stories of abortion only when they choose abortion?
We now regard mother and baby homes with horror, including how fathers got off scot-free while women were shunned and stigmatised by their own families and communities. It’s easy to forget that such homes were once seen as progressive because they allowed the mother to conceal her pregnancy, have the baby adopted and go on with her life. The assumption that anyone could just go on with her life after giving birth and giving up a baby seems bizarre to us now.
Yet how different are we today, when we assume the problem of an unwanted pregnancy can be erased by abortion, and that any obstacle to this quick and invisible erasure must be removed? Abortion facilitates a societal shrugging of shoulders. Unexpected children must not be allowed to make demands on the rest of us.
We have moved on from a time when fear of community shame led to young women being sequestered away to a society where individual choice is the ultimate value. We never seriously engaged with what a society that cherishes every new life might look like. Abortion is reduced to an individual decision, which handily allows us to ignore all the systemic factors which pressurise women to choose one – everything from the cost-of-living crisis to housing. Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats, who rightly hammer on daily about these issues, seem to regard them as irrelevant when it comes to abortion decisions.
They dishonour women’s resilience and autonomy by ignoring those who, when given a chance to reflect, opt instead to continue a challenging pregnancy. They want to take that chance for reflection away from others.
