Reeling in the years!

So there I was last week watching “Reeling in the years”. Reflecting on how Ireland used to be. Out of the corner of my eye I could see day glow vests of people fanning out around the doors in my estate. I wondered who they were. It didn’t take long to find out as within a minute the doorbell rang. I opened it to see a man and a woman on my doorstep dressed in day glow vests on a bright summer’s evening. “Good evening”, they said “We’re here from the pro life movement to talk to you about the 8^th Amendment”. The years were well and truly reeled in as I remembered back to 1983.

So my opening line to my visitors was that I believed the people had made a mistake in 1983 and that it was time for the 8^th amendment to be repealed.  When they asked me why I explained that it was the original intention of the 8^th Amendment to interfere with medicine and stop contraceptives like the IUD and test tube techniques for treating infertility. I pointed out that in 1983 Ireland’s population was smaller than it is now however the numbers of women accessing termination in the UK had dropped in real terms by 25% since 1983 pointing out that it was education and not legislation that really worked.

Why I opposed the 1983 amendment back in the day was because that it was not proposed to introduce abortion back then. Rather it was a defensive move because pro life supporters felt that the 1861 Act which outlawed abortion would be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The net effect of the amendment was to freeze the law and medical practice. It is heartless to oblige a woman who is pregnant with a foetus diagnosed with a fatal fetal abnormality to continue that pregnancy against her own wishes. It is wrong to oblige a women who is seriously ill to continue a pregnancy or as we had a few years ago, a woman kept on life support simply because she was pregnant. Doctors with their patients or next of kin are entitled to take decisions in the interest of the patient. As medical technology advances more of these situations will arise into the future. The 1983 amendment was designed to freeze for ever more what a doctor can or can’t do for his patient. It was also a cynical political stick which Charlie Haughey used to batter Garett Fitzgerald over the head with.  My recollection of the count day was Ray Burke TD sitting god like reading out tallies in a referendum that his party was officially neutral.

I pointed out to the 2 man and woman on the doorstep that I feared the referendum would be nasty and abusive and personalised.  The lady told me that she had a friend who had an abortion after 6 months and that she was affected by it.  I’ve no reason to think that’s not the case. However nobody is proposing a time limit of 6 months in Ireland. We cannot influence what other countries abortion laws are.

One of my visitors looked to the other and eventually told me that people won’t kill their own child but will ask someone else to do it.  He asked me if I had any children, I told him I’ve 5 and none of them would ask someone to kill children either. That part of the exchange speaks volumes about the ignorance that will be hawked from doorstep to doorstep around this town.  We haven’t seen the proposed wording which the constitutional citizen’s assembly asked for yet and already a group is on the march asking that we oppose something that has not been proposed.

If the exchange on my doorstep taught me anything it is that little has changed in the last 35 years on this topic. The same people that opposed divorce, marriage equality, access to contraception and gay rights are now back to the future to where it all started in 1983.

Next year we’re promised a referendum. Let’s wait and see the wording but there’s a strong chance I’ll be knocking doors again. Maybe at the end of the decade the referendum might feature in Reeling in the Years?