Kate O'Connell (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am going to start by reading Lorraine's story in her words.

It was first published almost 20 years ago at the turn of the millennium.

I was 34 when I was widowed. My husband died in an accident. I had four children, from fourteen to four years of age. It was a terrible time and I never thought I’d get through it - the older kids took it very hard. My family were a great support, taking it in turns to stay over for the first few months, endlessly helping with the kids.

The following year was a big wedding anniversary for my parents and we all got together to plan a celebration. I had hardly been out socially since David's death, but I was looking forward to the party - it was at a hotel, with everything laid on.

By the end of the night I'd had a few drinks alight, but I wasn't drunk, just a bit fuzzy, merry. I took a lift home with a family friend, someone I’d known since I was 19 or 20 years old. There is no easy way to put this - he dropped the others in the car off first, insisted on seeing me to the door, and then pushed his way in behind me. He knew the kids weren't there - I'd told him they were at their cousins.

The horror of that night. I can't tell you. The feelings after he'd gone - shame, disgust, rage, and worst of all - total helplessness. God forgive me, it was worse than David's death - it didn't happen to me, it was done to me. I knew immediately I couldn't do anything about it- I couldn't put the kids or the family through a public court case: everyone always knows who you are by the end. I couldn't do it.

When I realised I was pregnant I felt total despair. I wondered what I had done to deserve it all. My whole sense of who I was seemed to fall apart.

I finally told a friend the whole story, and it was her support, and organising the abortion, that kept me together over the next few weeks. I can't tell you how awful the pregnancy felt for me - to be pregnant from that night. I wanted an abortion as soon as possible. But it took huge organisation with family and kids, and endless lies because no one knew. I hated that. I couldn't have got through it without my friend. She also booked me in with a support agency here before we travelled, and that was very helpful. I realised there that I was going to need help with the rape, and that there was help available.

I felt enormous relief after the abortion, and even felt positive enough to think about how I could pick up the pieces and move on. But the next few weeks were hell - all that pretending - that we'd had a lovely shopping weekend away or the reason why I couldn't go to the function I knew he would be at - it all left me feeling I'd made some awful mess that I was piling lie on lie to cover. All somehow my fault.

It's taken me a long time, and professional help, to accept it wasn't my fault - and to realise I'd lose, and the kids would lose, if I didn't find a way to move on from this.

For me, the abortion will always be a positive factor during a nightmare time. At least I could make that choice. Any other outcome, for me, was so unbearable it was unthinkable.

Some people seem to prescribe that in their opinion they only feel comfortable with terminations being allowed in cases of rape, or incest. On examining that point of view and opinion further, that would indicate that it is "the act" of becoming pregnant that qualifies someone for a termination, not the potential life that is a consequence of that act. If a person agrees with abortion "in certain circumstances", it is not abortion they have an issue with, it is the type of sex women have.

If abortion is only allowed in cases of rape, not only will women have had to endure horrific sexual assault but the onus will then be on them to prove it. A total of 65% of rape survivors who presented themselves to a rape crisis centre in 2015 had not reported their rape to an authority. In the Irish context, more than four in ten - 42% - of women have reported some form of sexual abuse or assault in their lifetime. The most serious form of abuse, penetrative abuse, was experienced by 10% of women. Are we saying that because these women had a man, and then a pregnancy, forced upon them that by virtue of the suffering they endured, they are more deserving of a termination? Why must a woman suffer, be violated and terrorised before people feel compassion for her? If a woman who is pregnant as a result of rape procures abortion pills and is caught, she can currently serve a longer sentence than her rapist. If we are going down that route would people think it suitable that we start inquiring as to the violence of the rape, whether it was committed when she was conscious or unconscious, whether she needed medical intervention, were there vaginal tears requiring sutures, cervical or anal surgery?

We heard from many experts in obstetrics and gynaecology, and law, at the committee. There is no "typical victim"; there is no "typical scenario". Do the people sitting in the Upper and Lower Houses in Leinster House, and outside these walls in the real world, think that "the punishment" that should be meted out to someone for perceived recklessness is parenthood? Does it give the people who want no change comfort to know, that no change means they get what they want, and to hell, literally, with everyone else? Does it make them feel victorious - and what a victory they have had until now - over women because of the power, the control, the pervasive shame and fear that follows us around into our homes, into our bedrooms and into our hospital theatres.

Our Constitution [by virtue of the thirteenth amendment] enshrines a woman's right to commit an act which is a criminal offence in her own country, as long as it is committed outside the State. By any yardstick this is a bizarre situation.

These are words uttered by the chairman of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in Ireland. What vested interest other than in the health and safety of women and infants has that man? What bias other than one towards safe and compassionate medical treatment could he be accused of? Spelling out rape in law would be "unworkable", a professor of law from Trinity College Dublin, David Kenny, told us in the committee. There is no diagnostic test to confirm rape, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr. Peter Boylan told us. "It can take up to two years for rape proceedings to come to court", Professor Siobhán Mullally from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission told us. How do we propose to square that circle? Dr. Maeve Eogan from the Rotunda Hospital told the committee that there is not a definitive or conclusive test that can either confirm or refute that the sexual intercourse has been unwanted. Do people honestly think it would be possible to convene councils of sexual assessment to re-victimise a woman and make her atone for a crime and a sin that was not committed by her but rather to her? Who would sit on such a council?

It was said in this Chamber many years ago that "our duty as a Legislature is...to deter fornication and promiscuity, to promote public morality and to prevent, in so far as we can...public immorality." Who would we as politicians elect to sit on these councils of chastity? There are indeed medics in the Upper and Lower Houses but none are consultants in the area of obstetrics and gynaecology as far as I know, although to judge from some of the contributions at the committee one would think that some people are eminently qualified in the area of female anatomy, human reproduction and, indeed, the field of public morality.

I wonder how such a council would have judged Lorraine, whose story I have told, with the permission of the Irish Family Planning Association, IFPA, its original publishers. How would those present and the people of Ireland judge her in her hour of need? Who are any of us, as a majority Christian people in Ireland, to sit in judgment on anyone? Surely the God so many people worship, myself included, is not so cruel as to restrict access for Lorraine to heaven? I find it bizarre that so many of the communications received by Deputies and Senators in the post contain religious pictures and holy Bible passages. We are sent images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary alongside pictures of the sacred remains of a child, or cartoons that speculate on methods used to terminate a pregnancy. The sick people who are driven to create such literature or to disseminate it widely are no Christians or Catholics that I recognise. They are not respecting life or the potential for life when they print those images out in full colour onto glossy postcards. They are, in their own disturbed way, disrespecting the sanctity and humanity of life. These same people have wished that Members of this House and the Seanad were aborted. That is what they write to us saying that they know God would forgive them for wishing that as if they have a direct line to the man above.

4 o’clock

They call us child abusers, murderers and handmaidens of the devil. Their creativity at crafting insults knows no bounds. I picture them gleefully dreaming up awful things to say, carefully folding the contents into an envelope and buying special holy stamps at the post office. I wonder how their God feels about what they say and what they do in his name.

It is when we have been at our most Catholic in Ireland that we have been at our least Christian. The special position of the Catholic Church was sewn into the Constitution in 1937, two years after the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which made the sale, advertising or importation for sale of contraceptives illegal. This Act banning contraceptives had a stereotypically, hypocritically and uniquely Irish flavour to it. It was enacted by Éamon de Valera's Government and, as Emily O’Reilly argues, it was part of a process of asserting the country’s "independence" from pagan England. To be really Irish, went the thinking at the time, it was necessary to be both republican and Roman Catholic.

The only voice of protest in the Oireachtas when the special position of the Catholic Church was being debated was that of the poet - we are all very fond of quoting him in here - and Senator, W. B. Yeats, the Protestant, Irish nationalist. Subsequent legislation in the years that followed imposed bans on married women being employed in the Civil Service, local authorities and health boards. The contraception ban meant that women would spend most of their adult lives pregnant, breastfeeding. and protecting their children both in uteroand outside. All the while, the church and State were colluding to subjugate and inter fallen women in Catholic-run and State-subsidised prisons, punishing them for the sin of sex and the flaw of being female. Irish women were quite literally enslaved, in an act of church and State collusion that could be honestly characterised as nothing other than sexual apartheid. Their babies were sold like puppies to foreign homes or enslaved in industrial schools to be preyed upon by those in power-wielding authority.

In 1943 in Cavan, 35 orphans perished in a blaze, locked into their dormitories as the fire raged. An RTÉ documentary from 12 years ago attributed that loss of children’s lives to the nuns not wanting them to be seen in their nightgowns. One of the 50 children who were rescued said that the children were ordered to say the rosary as the fire spread from the laundry to the second and third floors of the building. That was a slaughter of the innocents. Holy Catholic Ireland was a monstrous hoax.

When it came to children out of wedlock, the sin of having sex outside marriage was all-encompassing. The products of such sex were seen as the devil’s spawn. As it was women who bore the children, who laboured their births and nursed them at their breasts, it was the women who were unavoidably and visibly the most sinful. And what of the absent male parents of such offspring? No doubt some were married men, some single men, some brutal men, some cowardly men and some, I expect, were men of status, influence, and elected office. I studied Yeats again recently and found a speech he made in the Seanad on 11 June 1925 during a debate on divorce legislation in which he made some salient points. "There is no use quarrelling with icebergs in warm water," he said, and:

I have no doubt whatsoever that when the iceberg melts it will become an exceedingly tolerant country. The monuments are on the whole encouraging. I am thinking of O’Connell, Parnell, and Nelson. We never had any trouble about O’Connell. It was said about O’Connell, in his own day, that you could not throw a stick over a workhouse wall without hitting one of his children, but he believed in the indissolubility of marriage, and when he died his heart was very properly preserved in Rome.

Incidentally, that same year, a Tuam workhouse became the Bon Secours mother and baby home, a Magdalene asylum to house the promiscuous and sinful women and their unfortunate offspring. One in four of the little children there would die within a year of birth and, of course, the women were blamed for that too. A report in 1935 stated that the children died from causes traceable to the conditions associated with the unfortunate lot of the unmarried mother. No wonder the poor little outcasts were allowed to die of neglect. There should be a collective national guilt and responsibility for all the wrongs that were done to so many for so long. We conspired to do this to Ireland’s children, Ireland’s women and Ireland’s poor and marginalised. We murdered them in their hundreds through neglect and hate, brutalised them in the name of salvation and enslaved them in the name of redemption.

The electorate is engaged on this issue. They are the ones who are travelling outside our country at a rate of ten or 12 a day. They are not imaginary people. As the Minister, Deputy Harris, said yesterday, they come from Galway, Tipperary, Kerry, Waterford, Louth and elsewhere. They are married. They are in their 20s, 30s, 40s and sometimes 50s. They have children, they have partners, they have mammies and they are mammies. They have sisters and aunties and friends and, thank God, they have votes. They may not tell anyone and may never send an email or write a letter to a local newspaper. They may never report a journalist to the press council or to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, BAI, for not discussing abortion

in a way that they deem suitable. They may never send a miraculous medal to a politician beseeching him or her to vote for repeal. That does not mean that the people who do engage in such activities are more numerous, more important to consider or more worthy of representation.

Pregnancies come to an end every day, some in the happiest way ever, some in the saddest. Some come to an end in a tragic way, some in a surprising way and some alone and in secret. In January 1984, just three months after the eighth amendment was put into our Constitution, Ann Lovett died in a grotto in Longford with her infant boy. A 1984 letter written by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Armagh to poet Christopher Daybell, which was released by the National Archives in 2014, claimed that Lovett’s "sad death reflects more on her immaturity than on any lack of Christian charity". How Christian of that man. The poor, frightened, innocent teenager died a few miles from where my father was born, in Drinan, Ballymahon, County Longford.

What did the eighth amendment do to protect Ann Lovett? What has it done since for Miss X, Miss Y and all the other Misses and near misses we will never know about? Why should we hear about them? Why should we hear about their sex, their shame, their sin and their suffering? Who are we to say that we know best as politicians, when all the medical and legal experts one could shake a stick at have come before us over the past three months begging us to be compassionate and reasonable and to legislate for repeal?

I have been surprised by the overwhelming interest and support that my office has received over recent years from the most unlikely of places. I would hope that other politicians of all parties and none receive the same positive and

supportive contact from people in the months ahead, because I have no doubt that those who oppose repeal will seek to make their numbers appear larger, louder and more important than the silent majority that exists quietly in our parishes and constituencies.

See this speech in context