WILL we ever be able to break through the wall of silence that denies and marginalises the experience of Irish women who have abortions in Britain?
The latest act in this unfinished drama has shown, yet again, how little the people who have been most affected by abortion - men as well as women - feel able to talk publicly about their experiences, or express their views as to where, as a society, we should go from here.
At a conservative estimate, 65,000 Irish women have had abortions in Britain since the 1983 referendum. Most experts working in the field believe that the true figure is probably close to double that, given the number of women who have been reluctant to give addresses in Ireland. Yet, from this total, it is possible to count the women who have felt able to talk publicly about their experience in single figures.
We have prisoners serving long sentences for violent crimes appearing on television and telling us how they would like to see conditions improved. Victims of child sexual abuse talk publicly and with great eloquence about their experiences. Current affairs programmes regularly interview drug addicts and talk to inner-city families about how to deal with the scourge of heroin.
Don't get me wrong, I applaud these programmes and believe they have helped to increase our understanding of extremely complex issues and the need to deal with them compassionately.
But it does seem quite extraordinary that the relatively common problem of unwanted pregnancy, and how Irish women deal with it, should remain so unexplored. At the same time "experts"
lawyers, politicians, priests pronounce with absolute confidence what should be done.
What kind of crises do Irish women face when they make the decision to have an abortion in Britain? How do they arrange it? Do they have difficulties finding the money, or an excuse to get away? What are the actual mechanics of the trip and of the operation itself?
Do they feel guilt, or anger, or relief afterwards? What kind of care is available to them when they return to Ireland? Do their partners travel with them, or do they make the journey alone? These are just a very few of the issues which we are unlikely to hear the women involved talking about on RTE.
WE all know why this is so. Whenever I write about abortion I get letters, many of them anonymous, in which women describe the difficulties involved in arranging secret trips to Britain, of covering for each other to conceal the purpose of the journey from family and friends.
They do not write about guilt or shame. On the contrary, they know that they have made the right decision in their particular situation but, Ireland being Ireland, they cannot say this publicly.
Yet, if Irish women could talk about their own experiences of abortion it would I believe, transform the whole debate. Instead of listening to lawyers and other professionals discussing moral abstractions, we would have to find ways of dealing with the harsh choices that face very many Irish people in their daily lives.
This was brought home to me vividly when an American friend sent me a book called The Choices We Made, a series of interviews in which men and women of all ages and conditions talk about their attitudes to abortion. Some, though by no means all, are well-known.
Their experiences range from a time when abortion was illegal to the present, and many of them recount the messiness, the fear and the risks involved. What is striking is the variety and complexity of what they have to say and, as important, why they believe they have a duty to speak.
A woman who had a severely brain-damaged baby speaks of the love which she and her husband felt for their tiny, vulnerable daughter, but also of how unbearable it was to observe her terrible pain, the rigid spasms which n drugs could control. If she becomes pregnant again, the woman says, she must know that she has the right not to bring a child into the world who might be doomed to such suffering.
A political journalist writes, in his column, "a sad, personal story that normally you don't find a father talking about in public". His daughter has been attacked and gang-raped. He and his wife arrange for her to have the pregnancy terminated. "The abortion was not a traumatic experience. It was the end of a traumatic experience. If it had been illegal I would have violated the law. I would have done anything to prevent her from having to carry that pregnancy to term.
A Presbyterian woman minister describes her own abortion many years previously. She concludes: "The Kingdom of God is present when we see the action of God in, the world, when we can see compassion and mercy and love at work. I see Jesus as outrageously gracious and forgiving. Sometimes giving a woman a right to abortion is a compassionate stand, and when compassion rules over judgment we see the Kingdom of God."
The anti-abortion lobby keeps telling us that the overwhelming majority of Irish people are opposed to abortion in all circumstances. But we know that isn't true. At the time of the X case most people drew back appalled from what was happening and made it quite clear that they wanted the girl's parents to be allowed to arrange for her to have an abortion.
The judges in the Supreme Court accurately reflected that sympathy and sense of the proper way to proceed. It was endorsed when the electorate voted in favour of the right to travel and the right to information, a result which left it to the individual woman to choose whether or not to have an abortion, albeit with the caveat that she should travel to Britain to have the operation performed.
The politicians have failed to build on this perceptible shift in public mood. They could have used it to give a moral lead and enacted legislation that would have given effect to the Supreme Court's liberal and compassionate judgment. Instead they find themselves in a dangerous state of disarray where they are likely to be vulnerable to pressures from the various anti-abortion groups.
But the rest of us also have a duty to ensure that this is not allowed to happen. Doctors, psychiatrists, counsellors who work with women's groups and would like to see a more honest and open approach to the problem of crisis pregnancies can help to educate and shape public opinion by speaking out about the problems involved.
Given a little principled leadership, we have shown that we can deal with these problems in a notably tolerant way. The decriminalisation of homosexual acts is the most obvious ease, when web actually felt rather proud of how liberal we managed to be. That was handled with great political skill by Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, whose appeal to the Dail for understanding and compassion was crucial in setting the tone of the debate. Let us hope that there are women TDs in Fianna Fail who are ready to follow her example.