IRELAND’S OTHER TROUBLES : After Centuries of Silence and Fear, the Irish Finally Confront the Reality of Abortion

I HAVE TO BE HOME BEFORE THEY MISS ME.” THE YOUNG WOMAN WAS SO NERVOUS SHE could hardly get the words out. She lay, small and exhausted, in the corner bed, her brown eyes huge with anxiety, her hair starkly black against her pale face and the white bedspread. Along with five others, she was awaiting an abortion in a small ward of London’s Marie Stopes Parkview Clinic. Three of the women came from Northern Ireland; she was from the Republic of Ireland. She said she was 18 but looked much younger, and she seemed terribly alone, too frightened even to be comforted by the others. * Her anxiety was based more on a fear of being found out than on any dread of the operation she was about to undergo: If she missed the early boat back to Ireland the following morning, her parents and neighbors would start asking questions. She begged me not to take any notes, but when I assured her I wouldn’t even ask her name, she hesitantly told me of her journey from a small farm in southwest Ireland to this clinic. * The Irish Sea separates Ireland from Great Britain. The short stretch of water is very turbulent for an internal waterway, symbolic of the stormy relationship between the two countries as succeeding waves of Irish have fought to free their country from more than 800 years of British rule. That rough sea has also carried generations of Irish women to England to terminate their pregnancies. * Forty-two hours before I met her, this young woman had boarded a bus bound for London, having borrowed some of the money--it can cost up to $1,000 for the journey and the operation--from her best friend. Her pregnancy was the result of one night with a young man she’d met at a disco, the first and only time she had ever had sex, and she hasn’t seen the young man since. “I wasn’t using any contraceptive,” she whispered in a barely audible voice. “ ‘Twas my own fault. I never meant to go so far.” From the moment she found out she was pregnant, she knew there was no way she could have the baby. “My mother would be terribly upset if she knew I had sex,” she said. And although she knew little about abortion, she felt she could ask no one for advice; she was afraid someone would try to stop her. “I could never go home again if they knew I had an abortion,” she told me, tears in her eyes. “My father would kill me.” * She told her family she was going to visit a friend in Dublin for a few days’ vacation from her job as a hairdresser. Her friend would have accompanied her, but there wasn’t enough money, so she had come alone on the bus to the ferryboat that links Dublin to Hollyhead in Wales. Eleven weeks pregnant, she suffered from morning sickness and thought she “would die” on the four-hour boat trip. She avoided contact with her fellow travelers. “I was afraid someone would know my mother and father.”

The bus brought her to Victoria station in London. She had never been to England; indeed, she had seldom been outside Cork, and she found everything in the city strange and intimidating. “I’d never seen a black person before, except on TV,” she said. She had never known anyone who had had an abortion--she had no idea what the medical procedure even was. Her friend had read about the Marie Stopes Clinic in a newspaper article, and they had gone to a phone box in their village and gotten the number from British information. At Victoria station, she rang the number, but it was only 7 a.m.; she had to wait two hours until the clinic opened.

Although she had no appointment, a counselor met with her at once--clinic workers are particularly accommodating and sympathetic toward Irish women--and then was examined by two doctors. British law mandates a 24-hour waiting period between counseling and the operation; the young woman didn’t know this, and she didn’t have enough money to stay overnight in a guest house. The counselor gave her the number of a voluntary organization called the Irish Woman’s Abortion Support Group, which put her up for the night. “They were great; everybody here has been so helpful,” she said, tears starting again, “but I have to be home tomorrow. I can’t miss the boat.”

EACH YEAR, THOUSANDS OF IRISH WOMEN EMBARK ON A SIMILAR JOURNEY TO have their pregnancies terminated in England. But in the bitter wars over abortion that have racked Ireland in the last decade, even the right to make that journey and access to information on where to get an abortion in England have been threatened--until November, when the Irish people passed a referendum guaranteeing women both those rights. But a third part of the referendum, allowing for abortion in Ireland if the woman’s life was in danger, was defeated by a 2-to-1 majority.

Interpretations of the latter vote are now the subject of fierce debate, with anti-abortion and abortion-rights forces--both of which campaigned against it, for opposite reasons--proclaiming victory. But it seems clear that since 1983, when Ireland inserted an anti-abortion clause in its constitution, public opinion has undergone a major change. And perhaps most important, the silence that has surrounded the issue of unwanted pregnancy for centuries, the silence that sent so many women across that turbulent sea, has been broken. Now the country must confront the problem and all its emotional and religious complexities and find a solution its people can live with.

The irony is that abortion, in limited circumstances, is currently legal in Ireland; it just isn’t available. In 1992, a much-heralded Irish Supreme Court decision, involving a 14-year-old rape victim called “X,” interpreted the 1983 amendment as allowing for abortion in cases where the woman’s life was in danger, including the risk of suicide. In the wake of the November referendum, anti-abortion forces are now calling for a new, stronger amendment. “We want the issue put to the people in terms of whether the original intent of the 1983 amendment was to exclude legalized abortion or not,” says William Binchy, a law professor at Trinity College and legal adviser to the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign.

Abortion-rights forces, however, want the Supreme Court decision to stand so hospitals can perform abortions under certain conditions. “We see that as a first step on the road to achieving abortion rights for Irish women,” says Ruth Riddick, a longtime abortion-rights activist. For that to happen, the Irish Parliament would have to enact legislation to clarify and enforce the court decision. But right now, a new coalition government of minority parties is coming into power, and it will be some time before members are ready to make a decision on the abortion question.

Few people expect the outcome to be quick or easy. “The decision makers of this country really have a lot to answer for,” said a 21-year-old secretary who had an abortion in England. “In my lifetime, I do not expect to see abortion legalized here.”

Because of the Catholic and rural nature of Irish society, there has always been a greater stigma attached to abortion there than in England. In Ireland, any woman who has an abortion is considered by many to be a murderer, ostracized by her community and disowned by her family. The stigma attached to pregnancy outside of marriage is almost as severe. “Many women say to me that it would kill their parents to know they were sexually active,” says Riddick, who counsels women with unwanted pregnancies. While there is private compassion for women who “get into trouble,” these issues remain part of the hidden life of Ireland, whispered about hurriedly in back rooms or country lanes--almost never, until recently, publicly discussed. Even before the 1967 British Abortion Act made abortion legal, many Irish women went to England for back-street abortions. Since 1967, thousands of women have traveled across the water to have their pregnancies terminated in private nursing homes, mainly in London and Liverpool; in 1991, the official figure, according to the British Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, was 4,154.

“OK, so we don’t have abortion in our lovely island, and our green fields aren’t stained by the blood of aborted fetuses,” says Maxine Brady, president of the abortion-rights Union of Students in Ireland, an organization that has taken a leading role on the issue. “But we may have one of the highest abortion rates in Western Europe, proportionally speaking.”

There is little definitive information about Irish women and their abortions; their journeys are made in secrecy. The few statistics available are provided by the British. “Ireland doesn’t want to know about these women,” says Rita Burtenshaw, director of the Well Woman Center in Dublin. “A lot of Irish people would prefer to pretend they don’t exist.”

What is known is that the majority leave their homes furtively, often telling no one of their mission and inventing elaborate excuses to explain their absence. Colin Francome conducted one of the few studies on these women. In 1991, he handed out a questionnaire to 200 Irish women at abortion clinics in England. The women, he found, were frightened and ignorant of the abortion process, afraid they would be discovered and angry at the undue burdens put on them by their country.

“To leave someone pregnant, desperate, mentally exhausted with no one to turn to for advice or help is criminal,” a 44-year-old married woman responded to the questionnaire. A 30-year-old wrote that she personally had known a girl who “killed herself because she could turn to nobody, not even her own friends due to fear and shame.” A 21-year-old receptionist added, “They say we live in a free country; I’m not so sure, when we have to go to another country for help.”

Despite the fact that abortion was clearly prohibited by Irish law and society, anti-abortion forces in Ireland decided in 1981 that the country needed an abortion-prohibition clause in its constitution. Rapid modernization and economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s had created more opportunities for women, who in turn demanded more control over their own fertility, Catholic church or no Catholic church. Self-help groups, dealing with issues like rape and violence against women, had formed, and a right-to-choose group was organized. Condoms became available, and the Pill could be obtained in limited circumstances.

The secularization of Irish society frightened anti-abortion activists, who worried that the ban on abortion, too, could one day be challenged in the Irish courts. (Changes in Ireland’s social law have mainly been brought about by the courts rather than by politicians, who have a history of being intimidated by the power of the church.) To prevent that, the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign, aided by right-wing Catholic organizations, orchestrated a referendum to nail down the prohibition on abortion.

In September, 1983, after a long and divisive campaign, 53% of the Irish electorate went to the polls and voted by a two-thirds majority to pass the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, giving the fetus equal right to life as the mother. Afterward, Dr. Mary Lucey, president of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC), said, “Ireland is the country wherein unborn life is most protected, most respected.”

After the amendment was passed, triumphant conservative elements successfully brought injunctions against two women’s advice clinics in Dublin, the Well Woman Center and Open Line Counseling, to prevent them from giving information or addresses of British abortion clinics. Anti-abortion activists then moved against student organizations that were defying the ban. And last August, the Irish High Court granted SPUC permanent injunctions against 14 members of Union of Students in Ireland to stop them from providing pregnant women with the addresses of English clinics and from listing the clinics in student publications. Widening their scope, conservatives won injunctions that banned certain books on women’s health, such as “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” from public libraries and prevented British magazines and newspapers from carrying abortion advertisements in their Irish editions.

As a result, Ireland came to be seen by anti-abortion activists around the world as a utopia. “Ireland protects its unborn. As such, it is a sterling example to the rest of the world,” says longtime American anti-abortion activist Dr. John C. Willke, president of the International Right-to-Life Federation.

That was the myth. The reality was that none of those measures slowed Irish women’s abortion rate. According to the British Office of Population Census and Surveys, in the 1980s, 37,290 women who gave their addresses as the Republic of Ireland--about .1% of the 36-million population--had abortions in England, and the numbers have been steadily rising even as the measures taken to prevent abortion in Ireland increased.

But the restrictions intensified the fear and isolation felt by Irish women contemplating abortion. They were driven underground, forced to flee the country like criminals. Many were terrified of telling anybody--even husbands or partners--of their plans for fear of being stopped. It “created a reign of terror in the country,” says the Well Woman Center’s Burtenshaw.

The terror was pervasive: None of the women who agreed to speak with me would give me their real names. One young woman agreed on the phone to speak with me at Dublin airport on her way back from having an abortion in Liverpool. As the passengers disembarked, the only woman answering the description she had given me strode out of the airport without looking in my direction. Fifteen minutes later, I saw her watching me from a distance. She eventually agreed to speak with me but insisted we do so in a coffee bar at the airport. Afterward she told me she was terrified I was from some anti-abortion group trying to set her up. She was afraid to go outside with me in case I had “the guards (Irish police) or some heavy” waiting to beat her up.

Even abortion-rights professionals were wary. One Cork activist panicked when I phoned her, demanding to know who had given me her number and refusing to give me any information. Later she told me her husband could lose his job if her name was publicized.

One tragic result of the paranoia is that women are not seeking counseling in Ireland because they feel it’s pointless. Pauline O’Hare, a counselor at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service in London, noticed that as information on the British facilities became more difficult to obtain in Ireland, Irish women were arriving 14 to 15 weeks pregnant, whereas before they came at 8 to 9 weeks. Other British counselors report that the level of fear is so great that some Irish women are arriving without even having undergone a pregnancy test.

By the time the women get to a counselor in England, they seldom change their minds. “They are in a sense on a railway track once they get on that plane because it’s a lot of money and a lot of commitment to get that far,” says June Macpherson, press officer for Marie Stopes Clinics. “Our worry is that when they get here, they’re not going to sit and listen and talk it through because they feel that since they’ve got that far they must go ahead.”

“WHY DO YOU WANT TO HAVE AN ABORTION?” THE QUESTION FROM THE BRITish Pregnancy Advisory Service counselor threw Margaret, a 22-year-old Irish student, into a panic. “ ‘Oh my God,’ I thought, ‘I’ve spent all this money getting here, and now I mightn’t be able to.’ ” Sitting in a Dublin park two months later, Margaret remembers launching into a long explanation of her medical problems, saying her doctor had advised her to have an abortion. The counselor broke into her frantic recital, telling her to calm down, it was purely a formality; whatever reasons she gave would be acceptable.

Under the 1967 British Abortion Act, an abortion can be granted if the woman’s life is put at risk by the pregnancy or if there is a substantial risk that the child would be seriously handicapped. But the act also allows for abortion if continuing the pregnancy involves risk to the physical or mental health of the woman or her existing children, “greater than if the pregnancy were terminated.” By law, two doctors have to approve each case.

In practice, most abortions in England are obtained under the category of psychological distress. Under that definition, the doctors assume that the woman is the best judge of the risk to her mental health. This concept--that the pregnant woman is the one who decides--takes many Irish women like Margaret by surprise. In Ireland, as Frances Fitzgerald, chairwoman of the Council for the Status of Women, wrote in the Irish Times recently, “the underlying tone of the debate frequently suggests women cannot be trusted to consider such facts and to make a good decision.”

Because of the stigma and the fear of legal proceedings, women who have had abortions do not take part in the public debate. “The only thing you hear about abortion in this country,” says Margaret, “is that it’s murder, it’s evil. You never hear what the women who face crisis pregnancy feel because they can’t take part in the public discussion. They’re too frightened to talk about it.” In the 24 years since the British Abortion Act went into effect, only four Irish women, including singer Sinead O’Connor, have publicly acknowledged having an abortion.

Like many who arrive at English abortion clinics each year, Margaret was in a highly paranoid frame of mind. The day before she flew to Liverpool, a story had broken in the newspapers of an injunction being brought by an Irishman to prevent his pregnant girlfriend traveling to England for an abortion. “Even though I knew it couldn’t be me,” Margaret says, “I kept thinking, ‘Who have I told?’ At Dublin airport I expected to be stopped.”

Margaret had also heard about Youth Defense--an aggressively militant anti-abortion group of young people between the ages of 16 and 25 who were approaching women at Dublin airport and accusing them of going to England for abortions--and was terrified of being harassed.

To add to the pressure, she was due back in Dublin the morning after her abortion for the first stage of her final exams. She was 10 weeks pregnant and knew if she had waited until after the three-week exams she couldn’t have gone through with the abortion. “I do believe it’s a life, a potential person anyway,” Margaret says now. “It’s not that I believe any woman who has an abortion is a murderer--it’s not a moral question, more a balancing--I think how each individual woman feels decides it.”

She got pregnant while on the Pill. Because of health problems, her doctor told her she would have to be hospitalized immediately, for her own safety, if she wished to go ahead with the pregnancy. Even then, he said, there was more than a 90% chance she would lose the baby. He advised her to have an abortion. But, for legal reasons, he could not give her any information on how to go about getting one. “That upset me, because I was very ill,” she says.

Margaret did not tell the father of the child--her steady boyfriend, who lives in a different city--until after it was all over, although she knew her lack of trust would upset him. “I didn’t want anyone to influence me because I was too unbalanced myself. The slightest inkling of optimism or hope would have swung me, and I was the one who was going to have to live with the consequences.”

Their relationship survived, just. She couldn’t tell anyone in her “good, churchgoing, working-class family” either. They would have wanted her to try to have the baby, and knowing the sacrifices they had made to put her through college, she could not hurt them. “I’m the only one of my family for generations back who went to college, probably the first ever, and they have all these expectations.”

Margaret got the details of the Liverpool abortion clinic from a Union of Students in Ireland representative who, in blatant contravention of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child injunction, helped her set up the appointment, gave her flight information and arranged for her to stay with a women’s volunteer group in Liverpool. She has no guilt about her decision, although it still hurts. “It doesn’t hurt in the sense of doing something wrong. It hurts in the sense of why couldn’t the pregnancy have gone right. Obviously I wish it could have been another way.”

She is still trying to pay back the money she borrowed from a friend. The experience made her passionate about the extra burdens women wanting abortions have to endure, and she has since become an abortion-rights activist. “I was a mental and physical wreck during the whole period; no one should have to go through what I went through.”

WHEN MARGARET WENT TO LIVERPOOL FOR HER ABORTION, IRELAND WAS still reeling from the aftershocks of a rape-victim case in February. Called “X” to protect her anonymity, the 14-year-old was the first to graft a real-life experience onto Ireland’s abortion statistics. Her parents took her to England for an abortion. Before they left, they had asked their local police whether they should bring back tissue samples from the fetus to help with DNA identification of the rapist. Receiving no reply, they made their trip. But the query reached the Irish attorney general, who slapped an injunction on the girl’s parents to prevent her from having her pregnancy terminated. The parents were forced to bring their daughter back from England, without undergoing an abortion, in order to make submission before the Irish courts. As the judges deliberated, the international media descended on a country in uproar, and the young girl became suicidal. “It was,” says abortion-rights activist Riddick, “the first time that we felt rather than saw the consequences of the 1983 amendment, which we had heretofore only seen as a pious aspiration, a good thing in the abstract.”

It was the amendment’s own wording that provided the legal basis for the injunction: The state would defend the right to life of the unborn “with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother.” Subsequently, the Irish Supreme Court ruled that the young rape victim should be allowed to go ahead with the abortion because there was an immediate danger she might take her own life if she didn’t. The ruling, based on the court’s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment wording, seemed to open the door to legalize abortion in Ireland, at least in some cases.

The effect of the case on the Irish people was revolutionary. “What happened,” Riddick says, “is that we as a people said out loud, in the streets, in pubs, in our workplaces, on buses, in taxis, ‘If she were my daughter, I would have had her off to England.’ And while we know that is how Irish people have always felt in these terrible circumstances, we never said it before.”

Members of the anti-abortion movement were not so sympathetic: Teen-age members of Youth Defense told me that, though they sympathized with the teen-ager’s plight, they felt she should have been prevented from leaving the country, even if it meant institutionalizing her “for her own safety.” Dr. Willke thinks it was all a setup by abortion-rights forces, despite evidence to the contrary. “They looked for seven years to find a case, and then they found it. It was quite planned, and they found the right judge,” he says.

But polls showed a major shift in public opinion in the aftermath of the case, a clear majority of Irish people now favoring abortion in certain circumstances. For weeks, even months last year, the only topic of conversation was the X case: Radio switchboards were jammed with callers; protests were held around the country and at Irish consulates abroad; politicians, who had vacillated for years about legislating on the issue, now said the young girl ought to be allowed to go to England for the abortion, and some even dared suggest that the logical outcome was the provision of facilities for abortion in Ireland in certain cases.

But Dr. Lucey maintains that “the interpretation by judges was a very poor one. The whole thing was tragic and very sad, but at least for those nine years, unborn life was protected.”

When the fog from all the accusations settled, people on both sides of the debate realized that the situation had to be clarified in light of the court decision. There was also the added factor of Ireland’s new membership in the European Community; after they were banned from giving out abortion information in 1978, the Dublin clinics had appealed their case to the European Court of Human Rights, and in October, the court ruled that the ban was in contravention of the clinics’ rights. That judgment, though not binding on the Irish government, carried a moral weight. After months of deliberation, the government announced its intention of holding another referendum on three aspects of the abortion issue: (a) the right to travel to another state, (b) the right to information on services available in another state, and (c) under what circumstances abortion would be permissible in Ireland.

Within hours, the country seemed to be transported back nine years. Favorable reaction to the first two sections was predictable in light of the X case, but the wording of the third section was confusing and controversial: It prohibited abortion except “to save the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother” and specifically ruled out the threat of suicide as a reason for abortion--the whole basis for the X judgment--making it unpalatable to abortion-rights activists.

To add to the confusion, the government was forced to call a general election for unrelated reasons; this was scheduled in November, for the same day as the abortion referendum. In the end, 62% of the voters were in favor of women being allowed to travel to get an abortion, 60% believed abortion information should be available in Ireland, but 65% rejected the government’s wording on when abortion should be legal. “It reveals that there is in Ireland a discernible, measurable majority against legalized abortion,” says Pro-Life Amendment Campaign adviser Binchy.

Many commentators dispute that interpretation. A poll by the Irish Countrywomen’s Assn. found that 73% of its members favored the availability of abortion when a woman’s health was at risk, and 63% said it should be available after rape or sexual abuse. The referendum, however, offered no outlet for that point of view, and abortion-rights forces believe that some who voted against the referendum were rejecting its restrictive wording.

“The nation voted with the memory of how we felt about a 14-year-old and with the knowledge of nine years of contentious debate,” says Riddick. “In 1983, we didn’t know what the issues were because abortion was never talked about. Now we do, and we’re facing up to the complexity of the reality.”

The incongruities of the vote are not lost on observers: Ireland has once again come up with an Irish solution to an Irish problem. Political journalist Mary Holland wrote in an Irish Times column, “We are being asked to write into our Constitution, which articulates our aspirations as a people, an amendment which says that an act which is a heinous crime if committed in Ireland--the killing of an unborn child--is perfectly acceptable as long as it is done in England.”