LABOUR LEADER IVANA Bacik spoke to The Journal about how the route to abortion rights went from being a “desperately lonely ” movement on the periphery of society to becoming a mainstream political issue.
The subject of access to abortion stills holds the public’s attention today with a recent review finding that issues such as geographic location, the three-day waiting period and other obstacles still impede women’s access to abortion services.
With the fifth anniversary of the Repeal referendum result occurring this week, and the recent publication of the review into current abortion legislation, the story of how Ireland’s attitude towards abortion became what it is today remains just as relevant as it was in 2018.
From a small student movement with little to no political support to the success of the 2018 Repeal the 8th campaign, change has come in small steps, says Bacik.
So what first sparked her interest and involvement in the pro-choice movement?
“I was threatened with prison for giving information on abortion to women in crisis pregnancy in 1989, as student union president in Trinity. That would spark your interest alright!” she says.
Bacik had a source of inspiration in her mother as well, who was also involved in women’s rights activism.
“My mom was a feminist activist and she’d been out canvassing and campaigning for contraception rights in the late 70s, early 80s. And then when I went to college, obviously, in Trinity there was a big campaign around contraception rights.”
“I became politically active in the students union and one of the guiding issues for me was women’s rights to abortion and contraception, but also you know LGBT rights. If you look back to the late 80s, obviously homosexuality was still criminalised, condoms were illegal, divorce was illegal.
“So there was a whole range of issues that got me involved in politics, the anti-apartheid movement, lots of things.
“I was very engaged in 89, and at the time SPUC, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, were threatening legal action against students unions because after the ‘83 referendum was passed, they started to move against any organisations openly offering the phone numbers of clinics in England to women with crisis pregnancies.”
The 1983 referendum saw equal rights to life of the mother and the unborn enshrined in the Irish constitution. It was criticised at the time for the ambiguity it eventually caused in cases where the mother’s life was in danger.
Abortion was still a major societal and political taboo in the 80s and 90s, which meant that those campaigning for its legalisation were outside of any large scale political apparatus. Essentially according to Bacik, the movement began and was maintained by a group of concerned university students.
Providing assistance to women travelling for abortions in England was part of the Trinity Student Union’s contribution to the cause, in spite of the organised opposition and targeting by anti-abortion groups.
“The pivotal experience for me was taking phone calls from women who were desperate to get a phone number, you know, women and girls all over Ireland who had nowhere else to get a phone number for a clinic in Britain. So we were supplying that every day we were getting calls in the union,” she says.
“We took a very strong view and position as a student body at Trinity, that we would continue doing that even when faced with the threat of prison, and in the face of expensive litigation taken by SPUC. We were pretty steadfast in that and I think the experience was certainly a very formative one.”
On a political level, there was very little to cling to as an abortion activist in the 80s and 90s, she says, and religion of course played a large part in that.
“The power of the Catholic Church, right into the 90s was absolutely massive. It’s probably hard to visualise now but you know, it was really difficult to go against that. There was overwhelming support for Catholic doctrine.”
International support
There were some examples and sources of support from abroad, she says, but for the most part it felt like they were on their own, at least until 2012.
“Well, we were very vocal and very small numbers in Ireland. For a long time it was those activist students in the late 80s, those of us who were caught up in it and directly affected by it, who were leading the pro-choice campaign through most of the 90s in Ireland and right into the noughties,” she explains.
“We did have some international support and help from great activists like Julie Kay who inspired the taking of the European Court of Human Rights litigation, which paved the way for the 2013 Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act.
“We had international journalists from other countries coming to us who found the Irish experience really interesting because we had a very broad, although small, pro-choice movement which grew out of the student movement rather than any organised women’s movement.
“That changed then in 2012 with Savita’s awful tragedy and a new generation of pro-choice activists became mobilised. And of course public opinion changed too, you could feel the change, but certainly through the 90s, there was little political support for abortion.”
Savita Halappanavar was 17 weeks pregnant when she was denied an abortion after suffering a miscarriage in October 2012. She later died in University Hospital Galway after contracting septicemia.
Savita’s death, which medical experts deemed avoidable, prompted a huge public outcry at the time.
“It was desperately lonely, yeah. And then we were attacked physically, which was a very bitter scenario and people often forget there were quite a series of referendum campaigns initiated by the right to roll back on the X Case,” she says.
The X Case was a High Court case concerning a teenage girl who was pregnant as a result of being raped. The girl wanted to travel to England to get an abortion but was prevented from doing so at first.
Eventually, The High Court granted an order preventing the girl from leaving Ireland but in a hastily convened appeal, the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that abortion was allowed in circumstances where there was a substantial risk to the life of the mother and that this risk could only be avoided by the termination of her pregnancy.
It became a famous example of the confusion brought about by the wording of the 1983 referendum.
“So, you know, there were a whole series of referendums looking to roll back even further women’s abortion rights. The initiative was with the anti choice campaign right up until the noughties, and even into the noughties.
“A few organisations really fought the fight for a long, long time, like the IFPA and Well Woman, but the activism, such as it was, grew out of that late 80s, early 90s, student movement.”
Bacik credits the Labour Party with instigating the legislative changes that resulted for the X Case, but says there was no one, single moment that tipped the scale.
“You know, when Labour went into government there was, for the first time, a commitment to legislate the X case.
“People think now that it was minimal change, but it was huge political depth to require legislators to pass laws making abortion legal, which was the 2013 Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act.”
That legislation, she says, “for the first time, gave doctors the process where they could perform a life-saving termination.”
“So that was the first time TDs and senators had ever had to vote to enable abortion. It was hugely controversial, but it was a real breakthrough.
“And then of course, the tragic case of Savita was a real catalyst. After that, opinions began to change dramatically, and that showed really in 2018 with Repeal.
“But we weren’t sure even during the referendum campaign itself that it would pass. So you could see public opinion changing but it was incremental.”
Recently, some countries where access to abortion services is legal have been rowing back some of those rights. These include the United States most notably.
Last year the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v Wade court decision which had formed the basis for women’s rights to get abortions. Since then a number of states have restricted access to abortion even further.
This is a trend that should be observed with caution and not complacency, according to Bacik, who protested at the US embassy in response to the court ruling.
“I organised protests outside the US Embassy to really rally us as a pro choice movement to remind ourselves that we can never be complacent, because women’s rights are being rolled back in other countries like the US or like Poland, where we’re seeing a backlash and abortion laws being made more restrictive.
“So Ireland has now become unique again but we’re unique in a good sense. We’re the country that just voted to legalise abortion through popular votes and our laws are becoming more liberal rather than the other way around, but I think we can’t be complacent and we need to keep active. So that’s the lesson from the US.”
While the transition hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing in terms of hospitals performing abortions, with just over half of Irish hospitals now doing so, Bacik is extremely positive about the progress that has been made so far.
“I think it’s been incredible. Given where we’ve come from, it’s incredible to see how many doctors have signed up. It’s so welcome to see so many women who are now able to access abortion services in Ireland,” she says.
“Clearly we need to do more, and I’d be critical of the slowness of response from hospitals. Not all are offering – I think it’s 11 out of 19 now offer abortion services – and there are still far too many women having to travel because they can’t access abortion here.
“But having said that, there were thousands of women travelling every year until 2018. Now it’s about 200 a year.
“It’s still too many and each woman deserves to get and needs to get the service here. We need to change that, but still it’s been a massive step forward for women. There’s no doubt about that.
“It’s really been tremendously positive to see the change, that women can access healthcare services here now. We just need to work to make it better again.”
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