For These Women, Traveling Over 9,000 Miles to Vote in Ireland's Abortion Referendum Isn't a Burden—It's a Necessity | Glamour.com
Published on Glamour.com, 24th May 2018
In 1983 the Eighth Amendment was voted into the Irish constitution, which states the life of a pregnant woman is equal to that of an unborn child, and outlaws abortion no matter the circumstance. But now voters have the chance to repeal the Eighth—and make history.
On May 23, 2018, Elaine Arnold, 31, will begin a 26-hour journey from Sydney, Australia, where she’s currently living, to her hometown of Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. She’s using all her allocated work vacation days, taking two flights, and spending over $1,440 Australian dollars to tick a box on a ballot. If enough people check “yes” like Arnold plans to, abortion will become legalized in Ireland for the first time.
Sorcha Lowry, a 32-year-old digital communications worker, has spent nearly $700 U.S. dollars so that she also can also return to Dublin from New York City, where she moved two months ago. She’s had to use her credit card to fund her travel, plus taking time off from a job she’s only just started means she won’t be able to travel back to Ireland again this year, even to spend Christmas with her family. But it’s a sacrifice she’s willing to make in order to vote yes.
“The minute the date was announced for the referendum, I booked my flights,” she says. “I have to be part of it. Not turning up would essentially be a “no” vote, so I have to do my bit.”
With by-mail and online voting not an option, any Irish citizen who has been living abroad for a maximum of 18 months and wants to vote must return to do it in person. It’s estimated that there are more than 40,000 Irish expats that are eligible to vote. Search for #HomeToVote on Instagram and it brings up more than 2,000 results, while on Twitter the hashtag has trended several times. Many who can’t vote are still planning to return to show solidarity using the hashtag #TogetherForYes.
Why are so many Irish emigrants willing to travel, some over 9,000 miles, and incur a huge personal expense just to vote yes? The answer is simple: We’re fed up with both the Irish government and religious leaders deciding what happens to our bodies. Abortion has been illegal in Ireland since 1861, but, in 1983, the Eighth Amendment was voted into the Irish constitution. This states that the life of a pregnant woman is equal to that of an unborn child, and outlaws abortion for every woman, including in situations of rape and incest and if the fetus a woman is carrying has a fatal condition.
But now, on May 25, in a historic referendum, which means a country’s entire electorate are invited to vote, the Irish people will be given the chance to say whether they want to repeal this amendment, and ultimately allow Parliament (the Irish equivalent of U.S. Congress) to draw up a law permitting abortions in Irish hospitals at up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. After that time period, abortions will only be carried out on the grounds of a serious mental or physical health risk to the mother, or a fatal fetal condition.
Aoife Kenna, 33, works as a research scientist in the Netherlands. Her husband is staying behind to look after their 15-week-old baby so that she can travel. Meanwhile, Amy Fitzgerald, a 38-year-old mother of three, is taking two days off work to travel over 15 hours from Canada. She didn’t think she’d be able to return to vote, but her husband surprised her with a plane ticket for her birthday. “I’m guessing it cost over $1,000 Canadian dollars. When the Irish prime minister announced in late March that a referendum would take place, my London phone began to buzz with messages from my Irish family and friends: ‘Repeal party?’ they read."
Abortion may currently be illegal in Ireland, but this doesn’t mean that Irish women don’t have them. According to the most recent U.K. Department of Health Data, more than 170,000 Irish women are estimated to have travelled to the U.K. and the Netherlands for abortions since 1980. And on average every single day, nine women make the journey from Ireland to the U.K. to have an abortion.
Due to both the secrecy and stigma surrounding abortion in Ireland, these figures are probably much higher and don’t take into account women who travel to other European countries for the procedure. Unlike British women who can generally access abortion for free on the National Health Service, Irish women can often pay roughly £400—over $600 U.S. dollars—to £2,000 (over $2,600), depending on the number of weeks pregnant. Add to that the cost of flights, accommodation, and time off, and abortion becomes for many Irish women an option for only those who can afford to do it.
As a result women are often forced to order “abortion pills” online, which aren’t legal in Ireland but elsewhere are considered safe. One pill, Misoprostol, is even listed on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines, often prescribed by doctors to women whose pregnancies have become nonviable. Yet if you’re found in possession of the drug in Ireland, you can face up to 14 years in prison. It’s estimated that around 1,500 women a year are taking abortion tablets in Ireland without any medical supervision. Anyone who assists a woman in seeking an illegal abortion faces the same sentence.
The Abortion Support Network, a charity that supports Irish women in need of a termination, has said it takes thousands of calls a year from women, many who don’t have the finances to travel or who are trapped in a violent relationship, meaning they’ve had to result to even more drastic measures.
In a 2015 piece for The Guardian, ASN founder Mara Clarke described some of cases she’s dealt with including women who have drunk floor cleaner and bleach, a woman who took a cocktail of pills from her medicine cabinet, and a woman who asked her boyfriend to punch her in the stomach. "People say, 'Oh, you’re just making stuff up.' No, I wish I was," Clarke said.
When I was growing up in Ireland, abortion was a subject that was rarely discussed. I went to a Catholic girls’ school, run by nuns, where everything from wearing makeup during school hours to using condoms was considered a sin, so an open discussion on crisis pregnancies and abortion was hardly likely to happen.
Instead, we were told sex before marriage was a sin, thereby ruling out an unwanted pregnancy (never mind that of the Irish women who travel for an abortion, 70 percent are married or with a partner, and nearly half are already mothers, according to the U.K. Department of Health).
When my sister was 14, she was shown graphic abortion photographs by a group of nuns as part of a sex-education talk. One of her friends fainted. The nuns simply continued talking about “killing babies” at six months old. During church we’d often be told to pray for babies in limbo—aborted and unbaptized babies refused entry into heaven. This concept was only removed from Catholic teachings in 2007. Luckily, my parents were liberal and pro-choice. My English-born mother wasn’t even baptized, so my siblings and I would often come home from school and enlighten her on what they day’s religious teachings had included. She’d often roll her eyes and say, "Well, that doesn’t sound very kind or humane does it?"
I stopped going to mass at age 12, a fact that I revealed almost rebelliously to a teacher one Monday morning when they asked about Sunday service. She went pale and told me she would pray for me. Rosary recitals and candlelight vigils were often given as a solution to Ireland’s crisis pregnancy problem. However, no amount of praying could rule out the simple fact that if I or my friends, or our sisters or even our mothers became accidentally pregnant, or if we were raped and became pregnant, we’d be forced to carry these unwanted pregnancies to full term.
As a result, many women became supercautious, “going on the Pill”—if you weren’t already—became almost mandatory during Fresher’s Week—what Americans would know as a student orientation period. At university, abortions was also a subject I don’t remember talking about much, it was almost like you didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it out loud. No one I knew at university told me they’d had one, but when you hear the stats, of course, there must have been at least one.
Occasionally, a high-profile case would be discussed on the news. However, the women involved weren’t named; instead they were assigned a letter, the ‘X’ case, for example, in 1992 in which the Irish state tried to stop a 14-year-old rape victim from traveling to the U.K. to have her pregnancy terminated.
Miss X, Ms A, Ms B, Ms C, Miss D, Miss C—there’s an entire alphabet of female bodies in Ireland over which control of their own body has been taken away from them.
The repercussions of Ireland’s abortion laws became even clearer in 2012, when Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist died in a Galway hospital as a result of a septic miscarriage. Having begun to miscarry at 17 weeks and when it became obvious that her life was in danger, Halappanavar requested an emergency termination. However, as doctors could detect a faint fetal heartbeat and because—according to the Eighth—the pregnant woman's and the fetus’ lives are judged equally important, she was denied a termination.
Her death made all those who try and ignore the reality of abortion laws in Ireland in the twenty-first century sit up and take note. People took to social media to voice their outrage, both men and women marched on Irish Parliament, and many starting treating the subject of abortion as less taboo, openly discussing it against the backdrop Halappanavar’s experience.
Fast-forward five years later, when it was finally announced that a referendum would take place, and it didn’t take long for Irish women dispersed all over the world to start planning their return. Similar to the marriage-equality campaign (which was passed in 2015, making Ireland the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote) those in favor of #repealtheeighth know that the Irish expat community could play a huge part in getting the vote passed.
Claire McGowran, communications officer of the London Irish-Abortion Rights Campaign, says it’s a topic that really resonates with Irish people who live abroad: “It’s very rare that a news story unfolds [in which] you can really make a difference…. This could be Ireland’s equivalent of the #MeToo movement with women finally being recognized and able to stand up for themselves.”
Aoife Cassin, 26, is returning from Rome to vote yes. “If you’d asked me about it at 18 years old, I would have said abortion is terrible and I’m pro-life, because that’s what I was taught in school,” she said. “Then when I was around 20 years old, my sister had an unplanned pregnancy. She was living in Spain, so was asked if she wanted to continue with it. I realized that if she’d been in Ireland, that wouldn’t have even been an option.” Cassin said her sister decided to have the baby, but she realized that if she were in the same boat living in Ireland, she would have had to continue the pregnancy whether she wanted to or not.
It’s this lack of the right to choose that motivates most women. Yes, this referendum is taking place in Ireland, but its outcome could affect women’s rights worldwide. Both the U.N., the WHO, and Amnesty International have stated that the way the law currently stands in Ireland violates human rights.
As you read this, at least 10 Irish women are making a journey abroad to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Some of them may be victims of rape.
To be sure, most of the women I’ve spoken to explain that they want to be proud to call Ireland their home. It’s why so many of us are on our way back to Ireland’s airports right this second. We’re heading to the arrivals halls, ready to check that “yes” box without a second thought, because we’ve had enough of being shamefully dropped off at Ireland’s departure gates.
