‘This Wasn’t About Introducing Abortion To Ireland, It Has Been There For Decades, This Was About Accepting Women’s Autonomy’

For years of campaigning to legalise abortion in Ireland, thousands of women watched their own life choices scrutinized, their personal stories torn apart, their autonomy questioned. On the morning of the 26th of May 2018, when Ireland overwhelmingly voted in favour of legalizing abortion, relief swept over the 66.4% percent of the population who had voted yes. One of them being Grainne Griffin, abortion rights activist and founder member of the Together For Yes campaign, who had fought for access to legal, safe abortions for six years.

‘The actual scale of the yes vote meant that in the end it really was about much more than abortion,’ Grainne tells me, ‘I mean this wasn’t about the introduction of abortion to Ireland - abortions been Ireland for decades - this was about whether or not we were prepared to accept the decisions women made as being the right decision for them.’

Grainne had been campaigning for the right to abortion since 2012, when she set up a grassroots based movement Abortion Rights Campaign across the Island of Ireland. Over the years, they organized marches, worked alongside the UK and various other communities, performing and educating people, building networks of local groups who could too campaign for free, safe and legal abortion access and ultimately piling on the pressure for the government to call a referendum. And she did it all with a full-time job.

‘My work there would have been on a voluntary capacity, as was everybody else's. I took annual leave to work full time on the campaign coming up to the referendum,’ she says, ‘it’s certainly something that women in Ireland have been giving away their evenings and their lunchtimes to for a very long time.’ Of course, it’s not just the sacrifice of time that women in Ireland have been giving up to fight for their human rights, it’s the emotional labour of working on something with such high stakes. When I ask Grainne what some of the toughest moments were, it’s her first thought.

‘The stakes were so high, there was never a moment where you could ever forget that and that was a significant pressure,’ she says, ‘you could never relax for a second so there was absolutely no room for complacency.’

Of course, that was also a driving motivator to continue on when the battle seemed so steep. ‘Because it had been completed prohibited for so long, there was more than a stigma there was an absolute resounding silence on the issue,’ she says, and tackling that meant sharing the heartbreaking stories of thousands of women whose lives were made miserable by the eighth amendment in Ireland.

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‘People really did offer up their own experiences in a way that was incredibly brave and incredibly powerful but also incredibly difficult to listen to,’ she says, ‘the suffering and harm that the eight amendment has caused, so much of that came out to the fore and became public during the referendum campaign and certainly that made for difficult reading, it made for difficult watching, difficult listening.’

Knowing how high the stakes were, hearing the heartbreaking stories, while it came with emotional turmoil for the volunteers working tirelessly, it drove their fight through the legal obstacles, the nasty campaign tactics from pro-lifers and abuse the pro-choice volunteers received daily. In fact, those stories became so central to the movement that it allowed Grainne to see that changing the law means making the political personal.

‘When you move abortion into the court or when you move it into the legislator you tend to leave aside the personal,’ she says, ‘and you tend to leave aside the human element of it and it’s very easy to get wrapped up in creating barriers to access or regulations that will actually impinge on access whereas when you go back to women’s actual experiences - like how they access healthcare and the reasons why they have abortions - that really brings home the need for women’s autonomy.’

And while women’s voices enabled a successful referendum campaign, the way in which the legislation that came of it did present some barriers to access for women proved that there is still a need for greater respect of women’s autonomy in the legal system. ‘There will always be slightly mixed feelings on the legislation because it could be better,’ she tells me, ‘while we achieved an awful lot of what we looked for, there are items in the legislation like a three-day waiting period which are universally acknowledged as barriers to healthcare, they don’t improve women’s experiences or the medical experience of healthcare in any way.’

However, despite the barriers that campaigners continue to fight against, Grainne truly believes the power of the referendum result goes beyond changing the law. ‘Overall we have delivered a system of abortion in Ireland that is fundamentally free safe and legal, and we’re in a changed country as a result of it,’ she says, ‘It’s changed times, it’s not even a changed country it’s a changed time for Irish women.’

And now those women are inspired to do as she has done for years, to empower themselves through activism. ‘What was so wonderful to see was just thousands of Irish women experience activism for the first time and become empowered in that experience,’ she says, ‘I think getting to watch what those women go forward and see what they do now will be really interesting. And I think we’ll be watching what comes of all of those women for the next number of decades.

Grainne is one of our 10 Women Who’ve Changed The Conversation This Year. To mark International Women’s Day, Grazia and The Female Lead Have teamed up to celebrate the heroines who’ve made a difference to our everyday lives - even if you don’t know their name yet. We’ll be featuring a different amazing woman from the list every day online, and check out Grazia magazine on Tuesday 5th March for our list in full…