The #RepealThe8th campaign to make abortion legal in Ireland may have been a success last May, but it’s since been found that many of the country’s women are still unable to access the reproductive healthcare they’ve been promised.
Part of this is down to just how few doctors are willing to perform the procedures, for fear of protest and attacks from anti-abortion campaigners.
According to the 2016 Irish census, there are 4,761,865 people in Ireland. The same statistics show that 50.41% of Irelanders are women, meaning there are 2,407,437 women in Ireland. Yet there are just over 200 doctors who’ve signed up to perform abortions. The simple maths is, there is only one abortion-providing doctor per 12,000 Irish women. Considering the country has 4,000 GPs in total, there should, really, be one abortion-providing doctor per 600 Irish women. If a woman has tonsillitis, she is 20 times more likely to get treatment than if she is seeking an abortion.
Pressure is on for doctors to not perform abortions. Importing anti-abortion tactics from ultra-religious American campaigners, people are protesting outside family planning clinics, heckling women using them and practitioners working at them. An anonymous helpline set up to support women seeking abortions has been jammed by activists pretending to be women in need of help, and finding out where the clinics are, so they can picket them. There is fear doctors’ children will be targeted at school by anti-choice activists.
What’s bad for doctors is, of course, worse for the women who need them. According to a report by The New York Times, there is a website seeming to advertise safe and legal abortions in Dublin, which turns out to, in real life, provide nothing but anti-abortion propaganda in order to put women off of seeking a termination.
Because women in need of an abortion are finding so few doctors available to do one, the so-called cooling off period becomes more difficult. Going to the doctor twice in three days, so that they’re absolutely sure they want a termination, is made so much trickier when women in rural areas must travel miles to other towns to get an abortion.
On paper, abortion in Ireland is legal and available up to the 12th week of pregnancy, and longer depending on medical risks to the mother or foetus. But if it’s so hard for women to access, is Ireland really making good on its promise to honour a referendum result in which 66.4% of the public voted to allow women rights over their own bodies?
Just over the border, in Northern Ireland, news comes that a 12-year-old rape victim is having to travel to England for her termination. As per reports from The Irish Times, she was escorted by police, MPs have been told by a former Marie Stopes director, so that samples of the termination could be taken as evidence.
Even though abortion is legal in the rest of Great Britain in most circumstances under the 1967 Abortion Act, it is still not available to Northern Irish women, unless the woman’s life is in danger or there is a permanent or serious risk to her mental or physical health. Still, under these rules, a 12-year-old rape victim wasn’t allowed to access abortion services.
Only 12 abortions were carried out in Northern Ireland in 2018, reports The Independent. Amnesty International is calling for a reform of the rules, which have resulted in, it says, 900 women traveling to England and Wales for abortions in 2018.