Ireland looks set to make history by dumping harsh anti-abortion law

People in the Republic of Ireland went to the polls to vote on the country’s famously strict laws on abortion, and exit polls published on Friday local time appeared to show a large vote in favour of liberalising the laws.

Polls published by The Irish Times and national broadcaster RTE showed that about 69 per cent of votes were in favour of repealing the part of the Irish constitution that effectively makes having a pregnancy terminated illegal. The Irish Times put the yes vote at 68 per cent, while RTE put it at 70 per cent . Confounding expectations of a more conservative vote in rural areas, even outside urban areas The Irish Times exit polls found 60 per cent of people had voted in favour of liberalisation.

Across all areas, women were most strongly in favour of looser abortion laws, with the newspaper’s exit poll finding 70 per cent voted in favour, while support from men for liberalisation was at 65 per cent.

If the referendum does indeed find Irish voters in favour of liberalising abortion laws, the government has said that it will introduce legislation that allows abortions on request within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and in special circumstances after the 12-week point has passed.

Currently, women who access an abortion in Ireland can receive a maximum 14-year prison sentence.

The BBC explained that the referendum effectively asked voters whether they wanted to repeal or retain the constitution’s eight amendment, which dictates that an unborn child has the same right to life as a pregnant woman. The eighth amendment was added to the constitution in 1983, and referendums in 1992 saw further amendments added that allowed women to travel out of Ireland to have abortion and to access abortion information.

The laws were amended again in 2013, after woman died because she was denied an abortion during a miscarriage. Doctors in Ireland refused to perform an induction that would’ve ended Savita Halappanavar’s 17-week-long pregnancy, which she was miscarrying, more quickly because the foetus still had a heartbeat when she was admitted to hospital. By the time the foetus died naturally 48 hours later as a result of the miscarriage, Halappanavar had contracted septicaemia, which killed her shortly after.

Although the point at which a pregnancy is considered ‘viable’ – that is, that the baby could potentially survive outside the womb – differs from country to country, it’s most often put at 21-23 weeks, making the likelihood that Halappanavar’s foetus, at just 17 weeks, would have survived birth at the point that doctors were fruitlessly attempting to save it near zero.

The 2013 amendment in the wake of Halappanavar’s death permitted abortion where a doctor feels a woman’s life may be at risk from pregnancy complication or because she may suicide.

But pro-abortion campaigners complained that the change made no reference to the impact on a woman’s health (as distinct from her life), that doctors were still able to opt out from providing abortions on conscience grounds, and that it provided no solution for women who became pregnant as a result of rape or incest or had a foetus with fatal genetic abnormalities. Women in these situations still had to travel outside of Ireland to access a termination, campaigners said. 

Despite those arguments, Roman Catholic Bishop Alan McGuckian told the Irish Independent in March that pregnant woman were “safer” in Ireland than in almost any other country in the world. “The medical system that we have had has protected pregnant women in Ireland better than anywhere else in the world,” the Bishop of Raphoe said.

McGuckian was commenting in the context of a Supreme Court case in which the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists had argued that Ireland’s current stance on abortion gave “rise to significant difficulties for doctors practicing in Ireland and has caused grave harm to women, including death”.

Asked to confirm that Catholic bishops were opposed to abortion in all cases, including those of rape and incest, McGuckian said that that was the case. “There are tragic cases of all kinds where a woman carrying a child in very difficult circumstances deserves all the love and compassion that we can give to her, her husband, to her partner and family,” he said. “But there is also a love for the child, the unborn child as I believe the constitution has always recognised, as one of us.”

The Catholic Church in Ireland’s official stance is that “all human life is sacred and precious, from the first moment of conception until natural death” and that repealing the eighth amendment would “leave the unborn child with no constitutional rights”.

The official referendum vote count isn’t expected to be completed until Saturday afternoon local time.

Do you think Irish voters made the right decision on relaxing abortion laws?