When Abortion Is Illegal : Ireland shows how not to handle the issue

Ireland is giving the United States a demonstration of life under a constitution amended to criminalize abortion, and Americans have started to watch with horrified interest.

In 1983, the Republic of Ireland amended its constitution, after a bitter fight, to make abortion a crime except in some cases when pregnancy would endanger a woman’s life. Last Monday, enforcing this amendment, Ireland’s attorney general sought and obtained a permanent court injunction blocking a 14-year-old rape victim from going to Britain for an abortion.

Atty. Gen. Harold Whelehan learned of the case only when the girl’s parents consulted Irish police to ask about the effect, if any, an abortion would have on the prosecution of the suspected rapist. Whelehan’s action clearly came as a surprise: Irish women have long availed themselves of British abortions without Irish interference.

Human rights activists as well as members of Ireland’s Parliament have protested Whelehan’s intervention and the court’s decision, calling it--abortion rights aside--an infringement of the girl’s right to travel. Whelehan apparently takes the grimly consistent view that if abortion is a crime, then law enforcement has the right to prevent someone from crossing an international border to commit it.

Anti-abortion activists claim that the girl is being exploited by groups who want Ireland’s abortion law liberalized.

Whether or not any group is using the case to change minds, it seems likely enough that minds may change in response to a case that so clearly highlights the cruelty of a blanket criminalization of abortion.

Will there be another Irish referendum on abortion? This case makes that imaginable.

Banning books as well as contraception and abortion, Ireland once imagined itself an Arcadia of peasant virtue; its vision was, in Samuel Beckett’s savage parody, “paradise peopled with virgins, and the earth with decorticated multiparas.” The censorship has now ended, and Ireland, in a thousand ways, has joined Europe. When it comes to abortion, however, Ireland breaks with Europe and gives the United States a glimpse of what may await us in our own future.