Abortion: Make America Great, Make America Like Ireland

 In 1973 the Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade decision as a practical necessity to save the lives and health of women who felt the need to risk death to eliminate an unwanted pregnancy.  Abortion was generally illegal, and had been so for many years, but the quest for an illegal and medically unsupervised abortion continued unabated.  The nation—and many religious figures—were ready to end the bloodshed with a compromise that should have satisfied both the proabortion and antiabortion factions.  The latter group would continue to organize politically and promote an absolute prohibition of the procedure.  After fifty years, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the current Supreme Court, meaning all fifty states would now be required to establish their own laws regarding the legality of abortion in their domain.  This is being viewed as a victory by some, but it is really a return to an earlier stage where the issue must be reargued and codified into law.  In effect, Roe v. Wade in 1973 was an answer to the demands of the general population.  Afterward, the contention over abortion passed into the political domain.  Now, the battle has returned to an arena in which the general population can express itself.  This antiabortion victory may be a prelude to an even greater defeat.  It has been suggested that Ireland provides the example of where our nation is headed.

An article provided by The Economist, Around the world, bans do not make abortion much rarer,  discusses the evidence that banning abortion does not limit the number of abortions; it merely makes pregnancy more dangerous.  This chart was included.

From this data the need for an abortion begins to look like a fundamental constant.  No matter what legislation is in place to ban it, its rate of occurrence is unchanged.  The article continues on to discuss the complexity of a woman’s health issues during a pregnancy and the difficulty of enforcing a ban that takes into account risk to the health of a pregnant woman.  That concern was elaborated upon by Fintan O’Toole in an article in the New York Review of Books: The Irish Lesson. 

O’Toole attributes much of the intellectual fervor behind the antiabortion movement to Charles E. Rice. 

“As a professor of constitutional law, he established Notre Dame University in Indiana as a redoubt of the conservative Catholic legal thinking whose influence most fully blossomed when Donald Trump appointed Rice’s colleague and associate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.”

“But back in 1973 Rice despaired of the possibility that even a Republican-dominated Supreme Court would overturn Roe. He hoped instead for a constitutional amendment that would be ‘unequivocal’ in outlawing both abortion and all forms of contraception that could be deemed to be ‘abortifacient’: ‘In order to prevent the licensing and legal distribution of abortifacients, the constitutional amendment on abortion must prohibit abortion at every stage beginning with the moment of conception’.”

There was no possibility of such a constitutional amendment in the US, but the advocates felt that Ireland, a country already under the thumb of a cruel and tyrannical Catholic Church, could set an example that might ultimately lead to success in the US.

“Divorce was outlawed, not just by statute but in the text of the Irish constitution. The importation and sale of contraceptives was banned. The laws against ‘gross indecency’ under which Oscar Wilde had been persecuted in England in 1895 were still in force in Ireland. Having or performing an abortion was punishable by life imprisonment.” 

Irish women, like women everywhere, obtained abortions when they needed them in spite of the legal constraints.  They merely had to take a short trip to England.

Antiabortion “missionaries” were sent to Ireland to encourage the citizenry to take the repression a step further.

“…the…aim was to make abortion into something it had never yet been in Ireland: a political issue. It was already outlawed by Victorian legislation that remained in force from the nineteenth century, when Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. No significant political party was in favor of repealing these laws. A small number of radicals argued for abortion rights, but most feminists and liberals were far more concerned with contraception, divorce, and other forms of legalized discrimination against women. What mattered for the Americans, however, was not this indigenous Irish reality but the possibility that Ireland could provide a vicarious triumph to boost their own morale and give them hope for the future.”

“Abortion was being transformed, as it would be in America, from a physical reality into a marker of identity. Majority identity in Ireland at the time was still defined by loyalty to orthodox Catholicism. The actual experiences of women who had abortions—their lives, their situations, their concrete choices—were successfully occluded. Life as it was really lived in Ireland would not weigh very heavily in the scales against ‘Life’ as a concept that one could be ‘pro.’ The satisfaction of declaring to the world that the unholy writ of Roe v. Wade would never be followed on our side of the Atlantic gave Catholic Ireland an inflated sense of its own importance.”

A referendum on a constitutional amendment banning abortion at all times and without an exception for rape or incest was held and passed, but it included a concession which would soon become a fatal flaw.  It would “guarantee the right to life of the unborn, but with due regard to the right to life of the mother.” 

O’Toole identifies three serious problems that abortion bans encounter.

“The first of these is bodily reality. Prohibition is as successful in this arena of human life as it has been for alcohol and drugs. It doesn’t diminish the number of pregnancies that women cannot or do not want to bring to term…If the purpose of abortion bans is to actually reduce the rate at which women terminate pregnancies, the Irish experience shows how utterly ineffectual they are. Some poor, vulnerable, or very young women and girls can be forced to carry babies they do not want, but a policy that depends for its success on female impoverishment and powerlessness is not easy to sustain in an open society.” 

If you take the extreme position that the moment an egg is fertilized it becomes a human being with the same rights to life as any other human being, including the prospective mother, you set up an unending series of conflicts of interest between the unborn and their mothers: which one should a medical caregiver choose to murder in a given situation. 

“It turned out that the constitutional amendment, intended to ban all abortion forever, had in fact established a right to abortion in some very limited circumstances. The conservatives were left to rail at the effects of their own handiwork, but they could never find a textual formulation that would satisfactorily obliterate in law the right to life of the mother.”

Ireland was beset with cases that aroused sympathy for the mother whose health or life was threatened by the intended absolute ban.  Similar cases are already showing up across the US.

“Revulsion…forced the Irish government to put forward further constitutional amendments, including one guaranteeing access to information on abortion services abroad and another assuring women of their right to travel out of the country to have an abortion. The conservatives felt unable to oppose these amendments. To do so they would have had to argue for pregnancy tests for women leaving Ireland and for the banning of magazines or newspapers that carried information about abortion. Yet by failing to insist on precisely these measures, they lost the integrity of their argument. If abortion is murder, such radical measures would be fully justified. If they are not justified, it is not murder…If conservatives shy away from the fiercely repressive measures necessary to enforce their ideological positions, they begin to seem cynical and hypocritical. If they do not balk at outright autocracy, they seem merely mad.”

Finally, it is inevitable that cases of outrage over the murder of a mother by overzealous antiabortion laws will turn the general population against what was once deemed reasonable.

“The third great problem that became evident in the Irish experience is that, while poor and marginalized girls and women are the primary sacrificial victims, some middle-class, well-educated women will also end up being killed for the cause of antiabortion righteousness. By their nature, antiabortion laws cannot be clear. They bury innately complex physical, social, and psychological realities in abstract phrases that can never be adequate to the multiplicity of circumstances in which pregnant women find themselves. In Ireland the once-and-for-all constitutional amendment of 1983 spawned five more constitutional referendums and half a dozen major cases in local and European courts. Buried within this thicket of argument were women’s bodies.”

“In 2012 a young dentist, Savita Halappanavar, died of sepsis in Galway University Hospital. She was seventeen weeks pregnant and, even though she was having a miscarriage, medical staff were afraid to intervene until they were sure that the fetus had no heartbeat, lest they be accused of having carried out an abortion.” 

That case received international attention and aroused the conscience of the Irish nation.  In 2018 voters would decide to eliminate the antiabortion amendment from their constitution.  And in so doing, they would succeed in freeing themselves from the smothering domination of the Catholic Church.

“Attempts to ban abortion did not preserve holy Catholic Ireland as an island of sanctity in the deluge of immorality. They ultimately served, rather, to force the Irish to reject the ideological system that created so many cruel hypocrisies. Arguably, the great victory of Irish and American conservatives in 1983 actually hastened the demise of Catholic Ireland by making Catholicism seem heartless, fanatical, absurd, and misogynistic. Abortion is now legal in Ireland—the beacon of morality that was meant to shine back across the Atlantic at benighted America has been turned off.”

May the religious extremists who enabled the overturn of Roe v. Wade be recognized for the “heartless, fanatical, absurd, and misogynistic” beings that they are.

O’Toole provides this summation.

“But even if Ireland no longer matters much to the history of American religious conservativism, it shows them their future. For what happened to the vicarious victory of the antiabortion fanatics in Ireland in 1983 will happen to their indigenous triumph in the US Supreme Court in 2022. They will cause girls and women to suffer. They will reduce female personhood to the same level as that of a zygote. They will spread shame and silence. They will kill some women by terrifying and confusing the doctors who should be treating them. But they will not change the necessity of abortion in women’s lives. They will not be able to enforce the coercive laws that their zealotry demands. And they will not find that the fulfillment of their long-held desire puts an end to the social change they so despise.”