The Irish Family Planning Association has launched the Campaign for Safe and Legal Abortion in Ireland. The primary basis of the campaign is a legal case that will be heard at the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of three Irish women who have had abortions in the UK over the past year. The IFPA is supporting the case as part of a new campaign aimed at the introduction of legal abortion services in Ireland. The case may not be heard for about 18 months and the IFPA will meanwhile start a lobbying campaign of political parties over the next few months.
I believe that this initiative should be supported on prudential public policy grounds. I'm all for "ending the hypocrisy" of sending 6,000 women abroad each year for terminations just to keep abortion officially out of the country. But the way to succeed politically in this issue is to avoid appeals to moral sentiment and the use of abstract notions such as "right to choose". That is not in the least bit incompatible with the attempt, as Professor Ivana Bacik says, "to move forward the law on abortion in Ireland from an entirely woman-centred perspective".
The legal case is based on the claim that the the three women were denied their rights because of the government's failure to legislate on abortion. The grounds on which the case is being taken are based on very particular and concrete circumstances. To quote Ivana Bacik from The Irish Times:
Travelling abroad for an abortion placed enormous emotional burdens for [the three women]...The law created delays and hardship for each woman which resulted in her having a later abortion at greater risk to her health
Bacik believes that this case will be successful and will ultimately force a change in the law, just as the Norris case in 1988 resulted in the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Recent opinion polls tend to support the claim that people in Ireland increasingly recognise that abortion should be legal under certain specific circumstances. But how do we move from legal argument to political reality?
No political party believes there are votes to be won by taking a pro-abortion stance. Nevertheless some parties, because of the political and ideological motivation of their hard core activists, are quite likely to be forced into putting some kind of pro-abortion positions on their policy platforms. Labour has come quite close to this. It's how this is done that is key to whether politics will avoid unpleasant polarisation around the abortion issue. As a Labour member I would not be keen to see the party become too identified with what many would see as something that is morally wrong. There are still many people of faith out there whose religion tells them this is so. Many of these are the type of voters whose class position should lead them to be natural Labour voters.
So do we attempt some elaborate deception or double-talk on the abortion issue? Not at all. Abortion is necessary in a society that does a bad job of educating its young people about sex. Abortion is necessary because women experience crisis pregnancies and giving birth would be even worse than the traumatic experience of going to an abortion clinic. The vast majority of women experience abortion as something of a personal tragedy and a solution to a crisis and not some casual or flippant lifestyle decision. A sensible abortion policy is firmly rooted in the need to provide care for women who experience such crises. Hence the need, as a matter of public policy, for a legislative response and not leave it to (foreign) judges who will be accused by pro-lifers of imposing their alien ways.
So let's keep the language moderate and respectful of religious conviction that would differ from a pro-abortion position. Let's not get sucked into some spurious battle where ones stance on abortion becomes the means of identifying one as being either on the side of liberal progress or conservative reaction. I reckon that a mishandled abortion policy could provide the most conservative and fundamentalist elements with a rallying cry in the politics of cultural defence, and such a mixture of pro-life and anti-immigration ingredients would make for a very nasty brew indeed.
I'm browsing around the blog for the first time and have to say I agree with the tenor of most of what you say, especially about the economy. I have to say though that I can't see the ECHR finding for the women in question - I'd be willing to bet it won't.
I'm not religious but I'm not pro-choice as it were and I wonder how many people there are like me in the country. I've thought long and hard about it, but I think "views" (or almost non-views) like mine don't come into the debate and that there's a definite line that anyone who isn't among the faithful doesn't object to abortion. I understand that I'm on shaky enough ground when it comes to zygotes and cells and all the rest, but I have to say that the phrase "an Irish solution to an Irish problem" isn't necessarily pejorative.
If the irish people do not wish abortions to be performed here, for whatever reasons, I'm not sure the service should be available, and I'm also far from sure that abortion involves a privacy issue. Note, I mean the civil rights notion of privacy involved in the use of contraception and freedom of sexual choice, rather than the notion that people don't have the right to have information about them kept private.
If views like these are commonplace, I don't think Ivana Bacik is the person to change people's minds.
SPUC can **** my **** by the way.
Posted by: copernicus | December 27, 2005 at 03:22 AM