Dáil debates

Friday, 9 March 2018

An Bille um an Séú Leasú is Tríocha ar an mBunreacht 2018: An Dara Céim - Thirty-sixth Amendment of the Constitution Bill 2018: Second Stage

 

2:20 pm

Photo of Mick BarryMick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The year I turned 20 years of age, a fundamentalist, misogynistic amendment was written into the Constitution. The year 1983 was 35 years ago. Since then 170,000 women have been forced to travel for abortions. For a new generation and those who can become pregnant today, it is a toxic legacy. It sits on their shoulders and haunts them, an unwanted ghost from a different century.

I remember the X case in 1992. A 14 year old girl was raped, and when gardaí were consulted, they told the family they did not believe she could travel to England, that it was against the law due to the eighth amendment. When the High Court was summoned, it said that the family could not travel because of the eighth amendment. It took 50,000 people to come out on the streets, promising they would be back the following week with twice as many people, to force the Supreme Court to overrule that verdict. The 14 year old went to England. Afterwards, we had a referendum and we voted to give women the right to travel. The right to travel is a fairly bitter right and more than 8,000 women each year go to places such as Liverpool and London in secrecy and shame. Every second year there is another case: the A, B, C and D cases; Miss P, Miss Y, Savita, Amanda Mellet and many others. What a country. Who can take pride in any of that?

We now have a chance to correct this horrible mistake and to remove the eighth amendment. Ten women daily still travel, with five women taking the abortion pill every day, but are denied medical assistance. There can be no doubt that the amendment must go. The same voices which told us to put it in the Constitution all those years ago, tell us to keep it there. Only this week we were told by the Catholic bishops that it would be a manifest injustice to repeal the eighth amendment. Was it not a manifest injustice that 170,000 women were forced to travel? The Magdalen laundries was a manifest injustice, as was the Tuam scandal and the mother and baby homes. With respect, the bishops may choose to get their own house in order before lecturing women about injustice. I and many others will be less inclined to listen to the voices of bishops than we are to listen to the voices of women and pregnant people, including women who have gone through the real lived experience of crisis pregnancies.

In the context of listening to women, my attention was drawn to a Facebook page which was started recently called In Her Shoes. Women can post a selfie on the page but it is a selfie with a difference. They post photographs of their own shoes, and then tell the story of their own personal experience of abortion. It is an excellent and revealing page and the stories are powerful. I will read part of one story into the record of the House.

It says:

We arrived in Liverpool, got into a taxi, when the taxi man heard my accent he said the address of the clinic without me telling him where we were going - He knew ... When it was all over I remember being so hungry. I didn’t want to go eat in a restaurant, I wanted to go home to my Mam - that wasn’t an option.

Another says: "From the second you're pregnant the 8th amendment suggests that you're not competent to give consent about your care". Another woman posted:

People are still ashamed. The stigma is still there. I don't regret my choice, I never did. What I do regret is the unnecessary journey it took, the unnecessary cost of last minute flights on top of the cost of the procedure.

In the course of the debate, I will encourage Members to listen also to the views of the expert witnesses who came before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Dr. Abigail Aiken from the University of Austin, Texas, surveyed the evidence of thousands of Irish women who had taken the abortion pill in recent years. Dr. Aiken found that the profile of a typical woman who took the abortion pill is totally different from the stereotype the anti-choice campaign would have us believe. The typical profile is a woman between the age of 30 and 34, a mother whose contraception has failed. The survey showed that 54% of people surveyed applied for the pills because their contraception had failed. Nearly two thirds, 63%, were already mothers. The biggest single cohort - at 26% or more than one in four - were those aged between 30 and 34.

Professor Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, an internationally renowned physician, was another expert to give evidence before the committee. Professor Arulkumaran had chaired the HSE inquiry in to the death of Savita Halappanavar. Professor Arulkumaran told the committee:

If abortion is not made legal, it will promote illegal abortion. Those women with influence and financial resources will get it performed in a safe environment. Those who are poor with less influence will resort to unsafe abortions. This would be a social injustice.

Those who told us that legalising divorce would open the floodgates were wrong. They now tell us that legalising abortion would also open floodgates. The experts, however, tell us that the Netherlands, which has legalised abortion on request along with free contraception and a national programme of sex education, has the lowest abortion rate in the world.

Some men of my generation have asked me what this referendum has to do with them. It is about their daughters and their granddaughters. We need to show support and solidarity and that we respect the decisions that women are sometimes forced to make. I was on the large International Women's day demonstration last night. There was a big one in Dublin, a big one in Cork and others around the country. I saw the new generation, of both genders and none, fighting for a different Ireland and a better Ireland to the one in which I grew up. We should stand beside them and behind them to show support to help them make the change this State needs to make.

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