I recently received an email from The Irish Times asking for the opinion of Irish abroad on the recent result of the Citizen’s Assembly on the issue of abortion and the status of the unborn in the Irish Constitution. I thought I might also put my thoughts on paper here. 

 

Should the current government cease kicking the 8th Amendment can down the road, I will most certainly fly home to vote.

Like many Irish people, I was moved in 2015 at seeing the #TakeTheBoatToVote crowd come home in their droves to vote in a huge majority for gay marriage, and I hope to see similar for a referendum on abortion.

Living and studying in Italy, I often have to explain the issue of the 8th Amendment to friends and colleagues. People are unaware that a woman risks 14 years in prison for an illegal abortion, some students from the UK are unaware that their fellow citizens in Northern Ireland face even tougher penalties. It shocks my friends here who may live at the very epicentre of Roman Catholicism and yet are not subjected to the levels of undue influence that the Church enjoys at home. Abortion is still debated here and there is the continuing issue of objecting doctors (over which the UN Human Rights Committee recently expressed concern), however it is an issue which isn’t just exported to neighbouring countries as we do at home.

The Marriage Bar, and prohibitions on contraception and divorce are all things I am too young to have experienced, but which all form a backwards picture of my country that I feel reflects unfairly on the real citizens of Ireland and on their ambitious visions for the island. It upsets and angers me, because I have always thought that the greatest aspect of our country is not our institutions or our laws, but rather despite them, it is the persistence of our people to overcome the mistakes of our past, to fly by those nets of nationality, language and religion.

I was opposed to the idea of the Citizen’s Assembly at its conception. We already have one, a quite expensive one at that, on Kildare Street. Their refusal to make a grown-up decision on this divisive issue is astounding. It is not as if we are the first country to debate the topic and come to a reasonable conclusion, in fact we are among the last in the western world. Nonetheless, the Assembly has been well informed by more experts than we might expect our representatives to consult in Buswells or the Dáil bar, and now their decision must go to referendum.

I expect the campaign to be difficult, divisive and emotive. While I felt most opposition to the issue of gay marriage came from religious groups and institutions, it would be unfair of us to say the pro-life campaign is motivated only by faith and scripture. The issue of abortion concerns our very concept of life itself, as well as our concept of the rights of women to bodily autonomy. It is an ethical, a moral, and indeed for some a religious issue.

Removing this issue from the rigid dogma of the constitution to the slow-moving but ultimately democratic channels of power in the Oireachtas is not the ultimate victory that progressives are looking for in Ireland, but it is most certainly a step in the right direction.