Bluebells bend and gently sway in the spring grass clinging in craggy spaces beside the Marian shrine just outside the village of Ballinspittle. Here, 33 years ago, devout Roman Catholic worshippers of the Virgin Mary, professed they saw the blue-and-white painter plaster statue regularly sway and move too — a message, they said, for Ireland to remain firmly committed to traditional family values and to reject social trends contrary to church teachings on marriage, contraception, divorce and abortion.
As Weekend Review visited the shrine several times in the weeks leading up to the May 25 referendum on abortion, it was abandoned — much like those traditional teachings. In a nation that only three decades ago professed to be 92 per cent Roman Catholic with four-in-five being regular attendees at weekly Sunday Masses, those traditional values have long eroded. Contraception is readily available — and constitutional referenda on divorce and, most recently three years ago on same-sex marriage, have left Ireland with just a constitutional ban on abortion in place.
Voters are being asked to repeal the Eighth Amendment to Ireland’s Constitution, a clause that was adopted in 1983 in another referendum that gives equal standing to a mother and her unborn baby, amounting to a ban on any — and all — legal abortions. It’s a clause that led directly to the death of one Indian woman in tragic and painful circumstances.
Savita Halappanavar died at University College Hospital in Galway in October 2012 from a septic miscarriage. She was a dentist and 31 years old at the time of her death, a week after she was admitted with severe back pain and was miscarrying. Both Halappanavar and her husband, Praveen, asked for an abortion to be performed. It wasn’t as doctors could still detect a foetal heartbeat. Her condition gradually deteriorated and she suffered septic shock and multiple organ failure.
Three separate medical and legal inquiries into Halappanavar’s death identified serious mistakes in her treatment at the Galway hospital. One inquiry, led by Professor Sir Sabaratnam Aruljumaran, noted best international practice would have been to terminate the pregnancy “in this clinical situation of inevitable miscarriage at 17 weeks … and infection in the uterus because of risk to the mother.”
Prof Aruljumaran is a Sri Lankan-born physician who is the former president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and is now president-elect of the British Medical Association.
Andanappa Yalagi, a retired engineer, wants his daughter’s death to lead to positive change. He said the abortion laws in Ireland should change. “We are happy people in Ireland remember Savita, and remember her when they are talking about abortion,” he says. “It is very good people in Ireland are remembering how she died. I want people to remember her. It is a long time. It is six years, and the law still has not changed.”
If a majority of Irish voters approve the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, the government has said it will introduce legislation providing for abortion on demand in the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy. As it stands now, before the referendum, the Eighth Amendment means legal abortion is unavailable in Ireland, even in cases of rape or fatal foetal abnormality. About 3,500 women travel to the United Kingdom each year for terminations and another 2,000 illegally order abortion pills online.
It’s legislation that is being strongly opposed by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church in Ireland.
“If we start making decisions about who should live and who should not live then we are opening up something, like where do we stop?” the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, Alphonsus Cullinan said on Waterford local radio recently. “Are we intentionally going to take a human life? The central thing is, is a medic going to intentionally take a human life?”
He says the issue of abortion is a very touchy, emotional subject, but ultimately it is a question of the strong over the weak, and “someone has to stand up for the rights of the unborn”.
From a deeply Roman Catholic family, Mary Mulally was 18 when she became pregnant. The pregnancy happened during her first year at University College Cork.
“It was what’s called a crisis pregnancy,” the teacher tells Weekend Review. She requested a false name to be used to protect her privacy. “There was no alternative. I took the boat to England.”
That was a decade ago, and she still lives with the anguish and guilt of having to terminate. “Even though I’ve had one, I still am torn by the issue,” she says. “I don’t believe abortion should be used as a form of contraceptive, but it was my decision to make and my decision alone, and I don’t believe for one minute that a male-dominated organisation such as the [Roman] Catholic church should be able to tell me, or any other women, that I shouldn’t have control of my own body and reproductive system.”
Since 1980, clinics in the UK — abortion has been legal there since 1967 — have recorded nearly 170,000 women with addresses in Ireland who had their pregnancies terminated.
Near that shrine in Ballinspittle, one poster common in the ‘No’ campaign reads: ‘1 in 5 babies in England are aborted. Don’t bring their problem here.’
It’s a poster that riles Dr Deidre Flynn, a general physician in the County Tipperary town of Ballina.
“Over the past few weeks a number of referendum posters for the No side have stuck with me,” she says. “Their interpretation of the statistics have hurt me the most because they do not include pregnancies that end in miscarriage or stillbirth. For the ‘No’ side, these pregnancies are inconvenient — they mess with their statistical interpretation. They turn a blind eye to those pregnancies that do not fit with their metric,” adding this has resulted in a climate in Ireland where “we do not discuss miscarriage, where it is talked about quietly and secretly.”
Heading into the vote, opinion polls nationwide give the ‘Yes’ side a lead of between 15 and 20 percentage points. But those same polls show that one-in-five has yet to make up their mind on the how they will vote.
Both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ sides are also trying to explain to voters that if the Eighth Amendment is abolished, the government will then introduce legislation allowing for abortion on demand in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
“People on the doorstep are definitely worried about the 12-week issue,” said Mary McDermott, a ‘Yes’ campaigner in the northwestern county of Roscommon.
Sile Quinlan, campaigning for a ‘No’ vote in neighbouring Sligo, said: “When you explain to people that repeal will be followed by abortion on demand, they are very surprised and shocked. There’s definitely a feeling that it’s a step too far.”
The proposed legislation would give Ireland a more liberal abortion law than the UK, and the campaign is drawing interest from pressure groups around the world. Given the recent vote and data manipulation scandals following the revelation that Cambridge Analytica had a role to play in influencing elections and referendum campaigns elsewhere, both Facebook and Google have taken steps to ensure the vote on the Eighth Amendment won’t be influenced by outside forces.
Facebook, under scrutiny for its role in Britain’s Brexit referendum and the 2016 United States presidential election, banned foreign advertising on accounts with Irish holders.
“As part of our efforts to help protect the integrity of elections and referendums from undue influence, we will begin rejecting ads related to the referendum if they are being run by advertisers based outside of Ireland,” the company said in a statement on its website two weeks ago.
Facebook also said it would rely on reports from established campaign groups on both sides of the campaign to identify foreign-based ads, as its automated election integrity tools are still in development.
On April 25, the company launched a trial of a ‘view ads’ tool, which allows users to view all of the ads any advertiser is running on Facebook in Ireland at the same time, Reuters reports.
Google went further and said it would not accept any ads related to the referendum, not just those from groups or individuals seeking to sway the vote.
“Following our update around election integrity efforts globally, we have decided to pause all ads related to the Irish referendum on the Eighth Amendment,” a Google spokesperson said earlier this month. The policy change took effect on May 10 and included YouTube ads, and was to remain in effect until after the referendum.
Anti-abortion campaigners reacted with fury to the move, arguing it deprived them of a key platform for their message and represents a bid to help those favouring a more liberal abortion regime.
“Its’ scandalous, and it is an attempt to rig the referendum,” umbrella group Save the 8th said in a statement. “Online was the only platform available to the ‘No’ campaign to speak to voters directly. That platform is now being undermined in order to prevent the public from hearing the message from one side.”
But the message is getting out.
When posters with the words ‘Licence to kill’ were put up in her neighbourhood in advance of the referendum, Amy Callahan decided to share the story of travelling to Britain to terminate her pregnancy.
Callahan, 35, and her partner Connor Upton were told 12 weeks into her pregnancy that the foetus had anencephaly, a rare condition that prevents the normal development of the brain. It meant the baby, who would have been their second child, would most likely die in utero or live for a matter of minutes.
Given the strict anti-abortion rules, the couple could either wait until their baby’s heart stopped beating or go to Britain for the termination procedure.
“I know that birth is not easy on a baby and the head is such an important part. I started to think about what would be the kindest thing that we could do and I didn’t think it was a pregnancy we were going to continue,” Callahan says from her home in north Dublin.
She and her husband told few people about that trip nearly a year ago, but now openly share their experience as part of the ‘Yes’ campaign. She recalls her grief and exhaustion in the two weeks ahead of their appointment at the clinic in Liverpool.
She wondered how she would have explained things to her son, then one-and-a-half years old, had she carried the baby to full term, and how she would have responded to friends and colleagues when they asked about the progress of her pregnancy and when she was due.
“It felt like we were abandoned by this country,” Callahan says. “We weren’t looked after here, we weren’t received with compassion at such a difficult time.”
The referendum will mark almost a year to the day that Callahan and Upton returned to Dublin on May 23 with the ashes of their daughter, Nico, in their hand luggage.
“The worst thing has already happened to us,” she says. “Whether this referendum passes or not, it’s not the worst thing for us, it’s about the worst thing for the next person and it needs to be changed.”
Some women who are against the change have talked about how much they valued the short time they had with babies who had little or no chance of survival.
Vicky Wall, a 41-year-old anti-abortion activist campaigning in the southern rural market town of Nenagh, says her doctor brought up the option of abortion when her unborn baby was diagnosed with Edwards’ syndrome, a genetic disorder.
“What the doctor actually said was ‘you can pop to England’, which was horrific,” she says. She carried the baby to full term, instead. “My baby was born at 32 weeks, then she died. I got to take her home, spend time with her.”
As in the gay marriage referendum, the role of the Roman Catholic Church this time is tricky: some feel the Church should be out in front robustly defending one of its core teachings. Others worry moralising by celibate priests may prove counter-productive.
“The priests in a way are damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” Wall says. The leaflets she distributes mention religion just once, to address concerns that campaigners in favour of the ban were imposing their beliefs on the country.
“Not true. You don’t have to be from any faith tradition to agree that human life should be protected... The right to life is first and foremost a human rights issue,” it reads.
From his home in Karnataka, the retired engineer and grieving father of Savita is also speaking out. “I will watch this vote,” Yalagi says. “I hope the people of Ireland will vote yes for abortion, for the ladies of Ireland and the people of Ireland. My daughter, she lost her life because of this abortion law, because of the diagnosis, and she could not have an abortion. She died.”
–With inputs from agencies
Mick O’Reilly is the Gulf News Foreign Correspondent based in Madrid.
