Time to air a dirty little Irish secret: in the sixties and seventies the word on the street was that if you were pregnant it was a better idea to go to a Protestant maternity hospital to have your baby. (In Dublin this meant the Rotunda rather than Holles Street). Why? Because in the Protestant hospital they would save you, the mother, ahead of the baby if there was a problem.
Obstetricians have two patients - mother and baby. But occasionally, in urgent cases where both mother and baby might die, a medical intervention will be made that favours one of those lives above the other. In 1983 the eighth amendment was passed to avoid this choice thus forcing on doctors and their patients an equal right to life of mother and baby during pregnancy. All hospitals (dealing with pregnant women) have since then had to operate under this fundamentalist belief enshrined in the Irish constitution.
Let’s imagine for a moment that abortion was not legal or available in Ireland, the UK or anywhere in the world. A utopian dream for those on the pro-life side of this debate. Now imagine you are a woman who finds herself in a crisis pregnancy (for men, if it is too difficult to imagine being a pregnant woman, imagine the situation as if it was your loved one: daughter/wife/girlfriend/sister/mother/friend).
The crisis pregnancy could be any of the following: i) you are 14 and you were raped four weeks ago; ii) you are 55, happily married for 30 years with four grown up children and you recently returned to part-time work. You thought your late period was the start of menopause but when you begin to feel sick you do a test and realize that you must be about ten weeks pregnant; iii) you are a 17 year old college student and the condom your boyfriend was using split; iv) you already have three children and discover you are nine weeks pregnant; you have just received a cancer diagnosis urgently needing radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Continuing the pregnancy is not advised as it will accelerate the cancer and shorten your life considerably. Treatment will cause severe physical damage to the unborn baby.
What do you do in this situation? Should access to a safe abortion in a hospital be permitted in any of these cases?
If continuing the pregnancy was the most traumatic option open to me, I believe I would try to end the pregnancy myself. How would I do this if the state would not help me to do it legally and safely? Internet drugs? Soapy water through a tube into my uterus? Hot bath and a bottle of gin? Throw myself down the stairs? Hit the lower part of my stomach very hard, repeatedly? Knitting needle?
Yes, horrific, but this is a list of the things that have crossed my mind – and I am aware that trying any of them would also present a serious risk to my own health. I hope my closest family and friends would help me and I hope that the health system would assist me in avoiding infection or death after the event.
The article referring to the “unborn” should be removed from the Irish Constitution as it is not helping. The Constitution is not the right place for such complex medical, social and moral issues. Legislation needs to be enacted with short time limits and freedom for women to freely choose (without having to pretend they are suicidal) to end their unwanted pregnancies. In my view twelve weeks is an absolute maximum time frame to consider. It is the natural point at which most women start to see their pregnancy as viable. Almost 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage with the majority of those (80%) occurring during the first 12 weeks.
Life is messy. Driving abortion underground or abroad is not a solution. Our Constitution insists on a conflict of interest regarding the equal right to life of the mother and baby when the fact is that babies in utero are part of the mother by virtue of the umbilical cord. An unborn baby’s life is contingent upon the life of the mother.
In Ireland we have been coerced towards referenda ad infinitum on travel rights, information rights, exceptional cases etc. Are we not capable of a compassionate framing of the law to protect women and health professionals in this most complex of questions?
© Alison Hackett (posted online as a blog on 2 November 2016)
This article was published as a letter to the Editor of the Irish Examiner on 27 October 2016. It has also been submitted (by Alison Hackett) to the Citizens Assembly as a personal comment regarding the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution.
The debate on the letters pages of the Irish Examiner continued in the days following publication. One of the more interesting letters outlines the Jewish religious perspective on abortion.
A second letter on the topic: "How insecure of us to make our laws, even changing our constitution, in reaction to British law"
Obstetricians have two patients - mother and baby. But occasionally, in urgent cases where both mother and baby might die, a medical intervention will be made that favours one of those lives above the other. In 1983 the eighth amendment was passed to avoid this choice thus forcing on doctors and their patients an equal right to life of mother and baby during pregnancy. All hospitals (dealing with pregnant women) have since then had to operate under this fundamentalist belief enshrined in the Irish constitution.
Let’s imagine for a moment that abortion was not legal or available in Ireland, the UK or anywhere in the world. A utopian dream for those on the pro-life side of this debate. Now imagine you are a woman who finds herself in a crisis pregnancy (for men, if it is too difficult to imagine being a pregnant woman, imagine the situation as if it was your loved one: daughter/wife/girlfriend/sister/mother/friend).
The crisis pregnancy could be any of the following: i) you are 14 and you were raped four weeks ago; ii) you are 55, happily married for 30 years with four grown up children and you recently returned to part-time work. You thought your late period was the start of menopause but when you begin to feel sick you do a test and realize that you must be about ten weeks pregnant; iii) you are a 17 year old college student and the condom your boyfriend was using split; iv) you already have three children and discover you are nine weeks pregnant; you have just received a cancer diagnosis urgently needing radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Continuing the pregnancy is not advised as it will accelerate the cancer and shorten your life considerably. Treatment will cause severe physical damage to the unborn baby.
What do you do in this situation? Should access to a safe abortion in a hospital be permitted in any of these cases?
If continuing the pregnancy was the most traumatic option open to me, I believe I would try to end the pregnancy myself. How would I do this if the state would not help me to do it legally and safely? Internet drugs? Soapy water through a tube into my uterus? Hot bath and a bottle of gin? Throw myself down the stairs? Hit the lower part of my stomach very hard, repeatedly? Knitting needle?
Yes, horrific, but this is a list of the things that have crossed my mind – and I am aware that trying any of them would also present a serious risk to my own health. I hope my closest family and friends would help me and I hope that the health system would assist me in avoiding infection or death after the event.
The article referring to the “unborn” should be removed from the Irish Constitution as it is not helping. The Constitution is not the right place for such complex medical, social and moral issues. Legislation needs to be enacted with short time limits and freedom for women to freely choose (without having to pretend they are suicidal) to end their unwanted pregnancies. In my view twelve weeks is an absolute maximum time frame to consider. It is the natural point at which most women start to see their pregnancy as viable. Almost 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage with the majority of those (80%) occurring during the first 12 weeks.
Life is messy. Driving abortion underground or abroad is not a solution. Our Constitution insists on a conflict of interest regarding the equal right to life of the mother and baby when the fact is that babies in utero are part of the mother by virtue of the umbilical cord. An unborn baby’s life is contingent upon the life of the mother.
In Ireland we have been coerced towards referenda ad infinitum on travel rights, information rights, exceptional cases etc. Are we not capable of a compassionate framing of the law to protect women and health professionals in this most complex of questions?
© Alison Hackett (posted online as a blog on 2 November 2016)
This article was published as a letter to the Editor of the Irish Examiner on 27 October 2016. It has also been submitted (by Alison Hackett) to the Citizens Assembly as a personal comment regarding the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution.
The debate on the letters pages of the Irish Examiner continued in the days following publication. One of the more interesting letters outlines the Jewish religious perspective on abortion.
A second letter on the topic: "How insecure of us to make our laws, even changing our constitution, in reaction to British law"