Why Leo Varadkar should push for another abortion referendum

Minister for Health Leo Varadkar has a fine welcome for himself, asserting that he is a “conviction” politician who is unafraid to say things other politicians avoid, most recently with his contribution this week to a Dáil debate on abortion.

Scrape away his rhetoric, however, and what is left appears to be business as usual and more of the same lamentable lack of leadership and conviction that has not only undermined politics in this State but done much to ensure appalling treatment of some pregnant women.

In his speech, Varadkar conveniently hid behind talk of the absence of a “mandate” to change the law, which is restricted by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution giving equal rights to the life of the unborn and the mother, the tragic consequences of which have yet again been highlighted, this time with news of a pregnant woman on life support.

Varadkar kicked the matter to touch while, at the same time, asserting piously that he was not happy with the status quo. That a Minister for Health would treat this issue in such a way is very disappointing; after all, he also criticised the horrendous practice of forcing women to continue with their pregnancies when there is no chance of the baby surviving.

That this stance is taken by a younger politician much touted as a future leader of his party makes it worse, because it underlines that the Irish solution to the Irish problem (in this case, Varadkar acknowledging that the problems with the Eighth Amendment will continue to do much harm to women and the medical profession, but then washing his hands of responsibility to do anything about it) is still the hallmark of the approach to the Irish abortion dilemma.

Varadkar said he wants to consign the “politics of the moral civil war” to history, but the only way this can be effectively done is to give the electorate the option of getting rid of the amendment.

The referendum campaign that led to the amendment in 1983 was certainly ugly and divisive; according to Nell McCafferty, it generated “ the pig ignorant slurry of woman-hating that did us temporarily down”.

In contrast, William Binchy of the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign insisted the amendment was “desperately necessary”.

Such language highlights the passions the campaign engendered, but it is often forgotten that only 55.6 per cent of the electorate voted in 1983.

Refused to engage

The amendment debate alienated many to the point that they refused to engage. Is it not now the case that after everything that has been brought into the public domain in relation to abortion in the decades since, there might be a lot more engagement?

The exploration of contemporary options does not need to be defined by the politics and prejudices of 1983, and that is why current politicians should be a lot bolder.

Cowardice has been central to how abortion has been dealt with in this State for many decades. Almost 60 years ago, the Kilkenny writer Hubert Butler noted that when certain aspects of Irish abortion practice could no longer remain completely hidden, most notoriously during the trial of Mamie Cadden, who was charged with the murder of Helen O’Reilly after a botched abortion in Dublin in 1956, there was still a reluctance to report or discuss it: “two taboos”, he wrote in relation to the Cadden trial, “had been violated. An unnatural act had been committed and a more than unnatural searchlight focused on it. We revolted against looking in the direction in which the searchlight pointed.”

His observations were not published at the time, such was the reluctance to acknowledge that abortions were being carried out in Ireland.

As a lively octogenarian in 1983 during the eighth amendment campaign, Butler was still vocal on the issue and determined to defend the right of private judgment; he insisted that the amendment would do nothing to solve the human dilemmas involved and also wondered about the selectivity of the “pro-life” passion: “What have we done in the past years for an unmarried mother or an unwanted child?” We certainly have no shortage of information now on what happened to so many of those single mothers and their children; their treatment is frequently referred to as shameful.

High time

Given everything that has happened over the past 30 years since the amendment was introduced, it is high time the Irish electorate was given an opportunity to decide whether it should be removed from the Constitution or not.

This is where leadership from the Minister for Health is required; the same minister who told us gravely that the amendment has had a “chilling effect” on a medical profession dealing with the woman whose physical and mental health can be so undermined by its existence to the point that, in his own words, “it has no regard for her long-term health”.

That long-term health should be one of his primary concerns, and not just rhetorically.