These are the faces of Irish people overjoyed with the passing of the Health Act 2018, allowing abortion in limited cases. The bureaucratic title belies the long history of abortion’a outlawry in Ireland. Two women galvanized the country to change Irish law — and their stories show how ubiquitous abortion debates have been in modern history.
By 1861 abortions had been criminal in Irish law, but the infamous Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution stated that the unborn and the pregnant woman had an equal right to life — this was in 1983, not so long ago. That amendment meant that doctors in Ireland wouldn’t normally perform an abortion because they feared prosecution.
The egregious problems with this regulation came to international attention when a 14-year old was raped by a man who had been sexually abusing her for years. When she got pregnant, her family decided to leave Ireland and go to the United Kingdom for an abortion, but the government wouldn’t allow it. The girl, in her third month of pregnancy, became suicidal and so her family tested the injunction that had been placed on the girl’s travel. The judge refused, writing that “the risk that a defendant may take her own life, if an order is made, is much less and of a different order of magnitude than the certainty that the life of the unborn will be terminated if the order is not made”.
Case X, as it became known, eventually catalyzed a voter referendum that passed in 1992 allowing pregnant women to leave Ireland to seek abortion, and by 2010 over 4,000 Irish women a year were traveling to England for the procedure.
For Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year old dentist, the Irish laws against abortion proved fatal. In 2012, she was 17 weeks along when something went wrong with her pregnancy: her gestational sac was protruding from her body. Doctors agreed that miscarriage was unavoidable, but refused to give her an abortion. The foetal heartbeat was still recognizable, and so Irish law forbade it. Halappanavar died of sepsis shortly after. This case ultimately resulted in the Health Act of 2018.
The Health Act of 2018 allows abortions up to 12 weeks and in certain other cases.
Sources: The journal.ie, “Twenty years in: a timeline of the X Case,” Feb 6, 2012, Sinead O’Carroll. Independent, “Emma Watson pens powerful letter to Savita Halappanavar, who died after being denied an abortion in Ireland,” Mon 01 Oct, 2018, Sabrina Barr. Wikipedia.
