People have the power

For 50 years after the foundation of the Northern State, fundamentalism ruled.

Abortion was spoken of, if at all, in whispers, surreptitious hands shielding lips. No so much ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’, as ‘whatever you say, say nothing’.

“I’ve heard she’s gone to England.” “Don’t you dare say that, she got a job in London.”

And show an unconcerned face when you feel the neighbourhood squinting.

Any time abortion threatened to break into the mainstream, the main parties rushed to reinforce their ideological defences, each out to consolidate its status as representative of its “own” community, anxious not to alienate any element within. Thus the relevance of “divisive” issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights to the “peace process”.

In 2007, a cross-party group of MPs sought to amend a measure before parliament, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, so as to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to the North. Rev Tim Bartlett, secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Commission, was fast out of the traps: “The views of the democratically elected representatives of Northern Ireland (must) be taken into account. This should be a matter for the Assembly rather than Westminster.”

Bartlett added that, at their recent first meeting, hailed everywhere as historic, the Primate of All Ireland, Archbishop Sean Brady, and Rev. Ian Paisley, had bonded over abortion: the bishops had full confidence that Paisley wouldn’t give an inch.

When the issue came towards a vote at Westminster in May the following year, Paisley, Gerry Adams, Mark Durkan and Reg Empey – respectively the leaders of the DUP, Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Ulster Unionists – signed a joint letter telling British MPs to keep their Abortion Act out of Northern Ireland. The woman who had moved the amendment, Islington MP Emily Thornberry, suddenly became a hate figure for Northern representatives. It was against this background that Thornberry was summoned to a formal meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and told to back off: she was endangering the peace process.

Thornberry was in tears afterwards as she told campaigners that she felt she had been left with no option.

There was an exact re-run six months later, when another Labour MP, Diane Abbot of Hackney, tried to reintroduce the measure. She, too, was told in no uncertain terms that preserving peace meant women must wait. Abbot pressed on, but the hint that the move might destabilise Stormont was enough to stymie her efforts.

Authority over abortion had remained at Westminster because the DUP and Sinn Fein could not agree on devolution of policing and justice. Paisley had already publicly been told by Government Ministers that if he wanted to keep abortion and LGBTQ rights out of the North, the remedy was in his own hands: agree terms for devolution of the relevant powers...

This was key to Paisley’s acceptance of sharing responsibility for policing and justice with Sinn Fein. The notion entertained by seemingly every establishment commentator that Paisley had agreed to power-sharing because he’d mellowed with age is laughable. But it’s what they want to believe.
So, no more debates on the ’67 Act at Westminster. It was all down to the Assembly now, where the DUP had a veto.
 
MAJORITY FOR ABORTION
 
The case of a young woman in the North convicted of procuring her own abortion with pills obtained from the internet has spurred many who would not hitherto have thought of themselves as campaigners into action.

The simultaneous charging of a mother for having obtained abortion pills for her teenage daughter has boosted the anger of women’s organisations, left-wing groups and advocates for civil rights.
As in the Republic, what’s brought people onto the streets about abortion has for the most part not been moral or political argument, but the plight of women in fraught circumstances being denied the right to choose at the behest of fundamentalist politicians (a considerable proportion of whom in the North also believe that boys, girls and dinosaurs once scampered together in the Bronze-Age hills and glens of Ireland).

A new willingness to assemble outside the Guildhall in Derry or City Hall in Belfast with banners proclaiming a woman’s right to choose reflects a tectonic shift in thinking, reflecting changes in material conditions – and generated in part by cases which have humanised the issue.
Current practice is based on the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act (UK). This lays down penal servitude for life for procuring or helping to procure an abortion. The savagery of the tariff has been an additional factor in persuading many middle-of-the-road individuals to come over to the pro-choice side.

“Pro-life” politicians and organisations regularly, ritually claim that they represent majority Northern opinion, or even “the people”. In fact, a Belfast Telegraph 2014 poll – confirming the findings of the government-sponsored 2011 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey and of a joint BBC/RTE poll last year – found that seven out of 10 Northerners want women to have access to abortion in some circumstances.

Sixty-nine percent believe that abortion should be available for victims of rape; 68 percent when the pregnancy is the result of incest; 60 percent when the foetus has a fatal abnormality.

Contrary to common perception, unionists were not found to be more reactionary than nationalists. On abortion for victims of rape, 71 percent of unionists were in favour, 60 percent of nationalists. That’s as vivid an illustration of the way the North has changed as anything to do with anti-sectarian action plans, community relations initiatives, or seminars on reconciliation.  

The way a society regards the pain of a woman denied power over her own body is a telling indication of its fundamental nature.
 
INHERENT CONTRADICTION
 
There’s a lurking contradiction in the “pro-life” case which is rarely commented on.
Anti-choice advocates declare that there are two human beings of equal moral weight involved in every decision about abortion. Society should cherish both lives equally, they say. But they don’t act as if they believe what they say.

Without exception, “pro-life” groups deny that a woman’s life is ever put at risk by being refused an abortion. If a threat to her life does emerge, she won’t be let die. The pregnancy will be terminated. This isn’t wrong, they explain, because it doesn’t amount to “direct” abortion; the abortion is a by-product of a treatment necessary to save the life of the mother – that is, “indirect” abortion. The distinction echoes the teaching of the Catholic Church and of many Evangelical Protestant sects.
But it makes no sense. If the life of the woman and of the foetus are equally to be valued, how come it’s the woman’s life which always takes precedence?   

Should a doctor faced with the fact that one of two “patients” with equal moral status is likely or certain to die if the other’s life is preserved toss a coin? Or make it time and time about? This is the inescapable logic of the basic pro-life position. They don’t spell it out because they know that if they did they’d be laughed to scorn.

As far as campaigning is concerned, the strategic problem for “pro-lifers” is that if they give way by a fraction of an inch, if they accept that abortion is acceptable in any circumstances whatsoever, the only function left for the law is to define and codify what these circumstances might be. 

That established, the case for allowing women to decide for themselves what the circumstances should be becomes irresistible. 

The “pro-lifers” are right on this one. There’s a slippery slope.

REAL DIFFERENCE
 
Way back in 1981, my partner Mary Holland became the first journalist in the Republic – maybe the first person – to declare in public that she had had an abortion.

More recently, a number of journalists have likewise “come out”. They are brave women. But I dare say that they don’t know – for one thing, they’re too young – what it was like back then, when the anti-abortion Eighth Amendment to the Constitution was being debated.

Mary was chair of the Anti-Amendment Campaign. She wasn’t just shouted at in the street, she was followed into functions and subjected at close quarters to spittle-flecked tirades delivered into her face. At one gathering, she apologised for leaving early, explaining that she had to get home for a birthday party for one of our children. A red-faced pro-lifer was on his feet in a flash: “The child you murdered won‘t be at that party.” Cue a chorus of jeers as she walked towards the door. Letters arrived not just at The Irish Times, where she worked, but at our home, wishing all manner of personal disasters upon her and promising hell-fire from the instant mortal life ended.

A number of other well-known women who had indicated they’d follow Mary’s lead didn’t step forward after seeing what befell her.

More than 10 years later, at the time of the “X” case, Mary was still writing about the right to choose and about the fact that thousands of Irish women had, like herself, gone to England for a termination. Still, nobody else stood up. Around the time of the Savita case in 2014, Diarmaid Ferriter referred to Mary in, appropriately, The Irish Times: “...In 1995, Holland found herself coming back to the issue and what she regarded as the lack of honest discourse and political bravery apparent in the failure to legislate...

“She wrote: ‘It would be an enormous relief if some younger woman or women were to start writing about the issue of abortion from personal experience and leave me to the relatively easy task of analysing the peace process. Please.’”

But it wasn’t for another 20 years, until the wonderful Roisin Ingle spoke up, that a second journalist stepped forward. Roisin’s initiative, if it didn’t open the floodgates, has certainly eased the way for others.

In the course of her career, Mary won the Prix Italia award for best European documentary of the year, for Creggan – also the best documentary ever made about the North. She was British reporter of the year and Irish reporter of the year. She was by a mile the best-informed and most insightful commentator in Britain or Ireland on the “peace process”. She inserted women’s interests into every aspect of her work. She made a real difference.

Mary should be given an honoured place in any account of the long and sometimes lonely struggle in Ireland for a woman’s right to choose.