Today most of us will be immersed in Christmas festivities, surfacing groggily from hangovers or just hoping the new year will come quickly and painlessly. So the proposed abortion referendum is the last thing on our minds. But for some women - and some male partners - abortion will be uppermost in their thoughts.
We know that 7,000 women a year make the journey to England for abortion: 19 per day. Up to 100,000 Irish women have had abortions over the last 30 years: you, your partner, your sister, your friend. But in a country obsessed with debating abortion, facing into the fourth referendum on the subject in 18 years, their stories are never heard. We never hear about the trauma of trying to get the money together without anyone knowing, of trying to get through a family Christmas without revealing you are pregnant.
It is not surprising that a culture of silence exists in Ireland, where a foetus is given a right to life equal to that of a woman; where even pro-choice doctors (they do exist) are afraid to speak out. Fear dominates any discussion about abortion, just as it dominated the contraception debate. Our rigid brand of indigenous Catholicism, combined with the enthusiastic adoption of Victorian hypocrisy, have led to a peculiarly repressive attitude to sexuality, particularly women's sexuality, in post-colonial Ireland.
Cultural sex taboos and patriarchal attitudes have been strengthened by the work of the moral crusaders. Abortion represents their last line of defence, since they lost on contraception and divorce. They have brought disproportionate influence to bear on politicians, with the result that Irish abortion law is the most restrictive in Europe. The cowardice of elected politicians has also contributed.
Apart from fear, hypocrisy is the defining feature of national discourse on abortion. Bishops, politicians and moral crusaders are not really anti-abortion; they are just anti-abortion being carried out here. They have created a two-tier system, where planeloads of women will travel to London in the New Year, but nobody cares about those women unable to travel. This is not just an Irish solution to an Irish problem, but an Irish middle-class solution to the universal problem of crisis pregnancy.
The referendum will copperfasten this hypocrisy. Its central aim is to reverse the 1992 X case, to rule out the risk of suicide as a ground for abortion. It will criminalise all forms of abortion. But in a trick of Orwellian drafting, abortion carried out to save a woman's life which is physically at risk will no longer be called "abortion" but rather "medical procedure in the course of which or as a result of which unborn human life is ended". All other terminations of pregnancy will carry a maximum penalty of 12 years' imprisonment - even where women in desperation seek to abort themselves, even where necessary to save the life of a suicidal woman.
The removal of suicide as a ground for abortion represents a very serious encroachment on women's rights, already undermined by the 1983 Amendment which equated the rights to life of the mother and the unborn. The two rights came into conflict in the X case, concerning a 14-year-old pregnant rape victim. The Supreme Court ruled that since she was suicidal, the continuation of her pregnancy posed a real and substantial risk to her life, so her pregnancy could lawfully be terminated. Reversing this judgment will endanger the life of any woman who is pregnant and suicidal but unable to travel abroad without assistance; like the young girl in the 1997 C case, to whom permission to travel was granted only because she was suicidal.
So let's be clear: under this referendum, the value of a pregnant child or woman's life will be reduced below that of a foetus. The right to life of the unborn will prevail in the next X or C case, and the outpouring of public compassion generated by those cases will have lost out to the culture of hypocrisy and political expediency.
Apart from its utter lack of compassion, the proposal to rule out suicide risk lacks any logical basis, depending on a spurious distinction between physical and mental health. Nor is there any logical basis to the arguments made by those who insist that pregnant women simply do not commit suicide. If this is true - and it is not, as international research shows - why is a referendum necessary to rule out a non-existent risk? The answer is because the Fianna Fβil leadership, the Catholic bishops and one anti-abortion group (the so-called broad consensus?) believe that women are so devious they will pretend to be suicidal in order to access abortion.
This view is not only deeply offensive to women, but also casts doubt on the integrity of mental health professionals. It would have been perfectly easy to draft legislation allowing abortion where a woman's life is at risk, including risk of suicide, in order to protect the most vulnerable women and children. Then we might have progressed to addressing the real needs of the majority of women, who seek abortion for a range of different reasons. But all sense of reality has been lost in the mists of hypocrisy surrounding the crazed referendum proposal. This is a wake-up call.
If the referendum is passed, not only will it endanger the lives of the most vulnerable women, but it will put back the cause of women's equality in Ireland by years. The culture of fear and hypocrisy will have triumphed over the values of compassion and logic. We cannot allow this to happen. The referendum must be defeated.
icbacik@tcd.ie
John Waters is on leave