The Abortion Papers Ireland: VOLUME 2 Image: Alice Maher ‘The History of Tears’ (2001) The Abortion Papers Ireland: VOLUME 2 EDITED BY: Aideen Quilty, Sinéad Kennedy & Catherine Conlon First published in 2015 by Attic Press Attic Press is an imprint of Cork University Press Youngline Industrial Estate Pouladuff Road Togher Cork T12 HT6V, Ireland © Selection and editorial matter Aideen Quilty, Sinéad Kennedy and Catherine Conlon, 2015 The copyright in each of the pieces in this volume remains with the original copyright holder. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 25 Denzille Lane, Dublin 2. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ISBN: 978-1-78205-172-5 Printed by CPI, UK Typeset by Burns Design www.corkuniversitypress.com CONTENTS Foreword: Above and Beyond the Silence AILBHE SMYTH Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Abortion in Ireland: A Legal Timeline Editors’ Introduction AIDEEN QUILTY, SINÉAD KENNEDY, CATHERINE CONLON 1 My Story JANET Ní SHUILLEABHÁIN 2 Dúirt bean liom … A woman told me … Punishing the productive and the reproductive PAULINE CONROY 3 The Catholic Church and Fertility Control in Ireland: the making of a dystopian regime SANDRA McAVOY 4 Speech for Abortion Papers Symposium, June 2013 ANTHEA McTEIRNAN 5 Reproductive Justice and the Irish Context: towards an egalitarian framing of abortion LEAH CULHANE 6 Towards a Reproductive Justice Model in Ireland LESLIE SHERLOCK 7 The Eighth Amendment: planting a legal timebomb STEPHANIE LORD 8 Abortion and the Law in Ireland IVANA BACIK 9 Discourses on Foetal Rights and Women’s Embodiment URSULA BARRY 10 ‘On the Run’: a story from the London-Irish abortion underground ANN ROSSITER 11 Civic Feminism and Voluntary Abortion Care: a story 18 Embodied Truths: women’s struggle for voice and of ESCORT’s contribution to reproductive justice RUTH FLETCHER 12 Speaking Up! Speaking Out! Abortion in Ireland, exploring women’s voices and contemporary abortion rights activism ANNE QUESNEY 13 Prison Sentence for Abortion is Cruel and Unusual Punishment PEADAR O’GRADY 14 Ireland’s Abortion Ban: honour, shame and the possibility of a moral revolution LISA SMYTH 15 After Savita: migrant m/others and the politics of birth in Ireland RONIT LENTIN 16 Water, Water Everywhere … exploring education geographies of abortion AIDEEN QUILTY 17 Every Child a Wanted Child LIA MILLS 18 Embodied Truths: women’s struggle for voice and wellbeing in Irish maternity services JO MURPHY-LAWLESS 19 Abortion Stigma: a health service provider’s perspective MAEVE TAYLOR 20 The Fragility of Respectability for Lone Mothers CATHERINE CONLON 21 A Holy Alliance? Obstacles to abortion rights in Ireland North and South GORETTI HORGAN 22 Abortion as a Women’s Health and Human Rights Issue: National Women’s Council (NWCI) activism on reproductive rights over the decades ORLA O’CONNOR 23 Ireland’s First Abortion Legislation CLARE DALY TD 24 The Radicalisation of a New Generation of Abortion Rights Activists CATHIE DOHERTY and SINÉAD REDMOND 25 Ireland’s Handmaid’s Tale SINÉAD KENNEDY Notes Bibliography Index FOREWORD Above and Beyond the Silence AILBHE SMYTH Tell us, they say, about women and abortion in Ireland. I’M NOT SURE THAT I CAN ANY MORE, or at least not in any straight-forward way. There are several reasons for this, as always personal as much as political. I’m not sure which is the most complicated, and in any case (in my case), the reasons are peculiarly resistant to partition. One way and another, I suspect it’s to do with the passage of time, the transmutations of generations and, above all, with how abortion is framed and dealt with in Ireland.1 But it’s not in Ireland, abortion, that’s the whole point. If it were, we wouldn’t be here having to write about it. Again. Or think about it, or not much, or not so endlessly. It’s Byzantine, this business of abortion, convoluted, complex beyond all reason and necessity, harrowing, tortuous. Also wounding, sometimes grotesque.2 As I’m writing this, keeping an ear to the ground, I hear a bishop speak. He says, inter alia, that lesbians and gay men who have children may be care-givers, but they ‘are not parents’. When asked about his views on a woman having an abortion after she has been raped, the bishop says women who become pregnant through rape should not ‘destroy a life in order to get back at the rapist’.3 That these models of logic aroused more satirical and caustic comment than ire is proof of the rapid and steep decline of the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland over the past twenty years. The bishop’s intervention in a secular debate is seen as contentious and out of step with contemporary morality and behaviour. It is counter-cultural. Irish people are no longer cowed or obsequious in the face of episcopal intimidation. And we’re certainly not obedient. Mostly, we don’t believe the bishop, and definitely we don’t do what the bishop says. To be fair (although I’m under no obligation, given our history of subjugation by the Catholic clergy), the next day, other bishops and priests rushed en masse to dissociate themselves from their fellow bishop’s remarks, and he had to apologise for any hurt he ‘might’ have caused, which is more of a damage limitation exercise than an apology. Mind you (I’m still being fair), it wasn’t the abortion remarks the hastening clergy were detaching themselves from, just the comments about the parental credentials of lesbians and gay men, considered as potentially damaging to the Catholic Church in light of the upcoming marriage equality referendum. So a strategic partial rebuke then. Nothing to do with truth. All the same, and it’s a change that changes so much, after generations of feminism, we know a lot more now about the truths of women’s lives, and we’re talking about them, not sub rosa and entre nous, but out loud and in public. Raising our voices in protest, challenging the suppression of the truth about the realities of our lives. I grew up knowing nothing. No one ever told me the ‘facts of life’, and I’m not sure when I even knew there were facts I didn’t know. Until quite a ripe age, sex and reproduction remained largely a mystery. In my convent school when I was about fourteen or fifteen, a nun told us in all seriousness that if we met boys (and we did, to be sure), we should keep our berets and gloves on at all times. For me, and for so many women of my generation and the generations before me, you had to learn on the job. Trial and error. The conse-quences of the errors were always left to us, the women, to bear. These were the wages of sin, because sex (outside marriage) and sin were synonymous. Hence the Magdalen laundries, followed, in so many cases, by the lonely boat to England and lifelong damage. I was lucky not to get pregnant. It wasn’t because I was well informed and well equipped. Au contraire. I was just lucky, that’s all. The silence surrounding abortion has been deafening, only ruptured every decade or so by a dreadful human tragedy – the loss of a woman’s life or the awful public drama of court cases taken to wrest from the state the right to an abortion here in this country. It has a been a silence where women cannot talk of their experiences, and where even to fight for women’s right to abortion has meant being branded as a kind of pariah. To be known as a pro-choice activist has been a consistent guarantee, throughout my adult life, of consignment by mute consensus to the social and political outlands. This is changing now, especially for younger women, but it has by no means entirely disappeared.4 In Ireland, the very word ‘abortion’ is unspeakable, shunned as too shocking, shameful, stark – and true. Not only is abortion exiled so that it doesn’t happen here, hic et nunc, and our hands clean, our consciences clear; it has been banished from the discursive hubs of our society, including academe, the media, and the Dáil, and effectively paraphrased out of conceptual existence.5 We have to break that silence. We have to end deceitful and damaging equivocation. We have to call a spade a spade, and an abortion an abortion. What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? (Rukeyser, 2005) If we had abortion right here and now, we’d be talking about it differently, in a matter-of-fact way, as neither more nor less momentous than other events and experiences in the life of a woman. Because that’s what abortion is: a matter of fact and a quotidian reality. Every day twelve women leave this country and go abroad, mainly to England, to have an abortion. It’s about time Ireland faced up to that fair and square. Persistent denial and problem-exportation is not only a disavowal of women’s human rights, it is profoundly dishonest. If we had abortion here, we’d be talking about it if and when we needed or wanted to, and not to satisfy the relentless probing of (certain) media for ‘true life’ abortion dramas. It’s an