Clear majority want legal ban on abortion eased but not abolished

Today's Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll demonstrates there is a clear majority in favour of repealing Ireland's strict constitutional ban on abortion.

That much has been evident before. What today’s poll also tells us, however, is that there is also a majority – among all voters, not just among pro-choice voters – that favours only a limited relaxation of the legal ban on abortion. That will have significant implications for the debate on changing the law which is now definitively under way.

Voters were offered three options and asked which they agree with: repeal to allow for abortion in all cases, as in the UK; repeal, but only to allow for abortion in cases of rape and fatal foetal abnormality; and not to repeal at all.

The results are clear.

About a fifth of voters (19 per cent) are convinced pro-choice voters, favouring legal access to abortion where a woman wants it.

Eighteen per cent are anti-abortion in almost all circumstances, supporting the current ban. Eight per cent don’t know.

The rest are in the middle. Some 55 per cent – a clear majority of all voters – say that they want the legal ban on abortion eased, but not abolished.

In fact, the grounds which respondents to the poll supported – to lift the ban but only in cases of rape and fatal foetal abnormality – are quite narrow. Were such a legal change to be made, the number of abortions in Ireland would remain extremely low by international standards, though pro-choice campaigners would doubtless point out that Irish women will continue to travel to the UK.

Still, when offered the explicit option to extend the UK’s abortion laws to here, the result in this poll is an overwhelming no.

Key group

Today’s numbers demonstrate that the key group of voters in any future campaign – and in advance of it while the arguments are thrashed out – is in the middle ground.

They favour repeal of the amendment but will almost certainly seek assurances in any referendum that Ireland does not follow the same route as the UK, where abortion is generally available in the first 24 weeks to any woman who requests it.

For better or worse, the legal situation in the UK is generally characterised as “abortion on demand”. It is hardly a pretty phrase, but at least everyone knows what it means.

The poll suggests that the days of the Eighth Amendment are numbered. Just 18 per cent of respondents to the poll say the amendment (which, as article 40.3.3, gives constitutional protection to the unborn) should not be repealed, continuing the current situation where only women whose life is threatened by the pregnancy (including by suicide), are legally permitted to have an abortion in this country. Support for retaining it is highest among older voters.

Ireland’s restrictive abortion regime has largely survived the introduction of the Protection of Human Life in Pregnancy Act in 2013, the legislation which gave force to the X case of 1992, which established the right to an abortion under Irish law where the mother threatens to take her own life.

Warnings by anti-abortion campaigners and TDs at that time that the legislation would lead to widespread abortion in Ireland have – so far, at least – proved unfounded.

This may become an important fact in a campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment.

Why? Today’s poll suggests the middle ground in this debate may require legal assurances that that a UK-style abortion regime would not be the result of any proposed change. This might come perhaps in the shape of draft legislation, or perhaps in the shape of an amendment to the amendment, rather than its complete abolition.

The fact that the X-case legislation did not “open the floodgates” to abortion may help convince voters that it is possible to introduce limited access to abortion – which appears to be, on the evidence of today’s numbers, what many people want. Though working out the exact nature of the rape and fatal foetal abnormality exceptions to a general ban is likely to prove just as difficult and contentious as the suicide exception did.

Campaigners on each side will draw on statistics as they help their own case. But today’s poll demonstrates the great majority of people do not share the views of the campaigners on either side.

What the poll does not tell us, however, is how the middle ground will react to the arguments and campaigns that are now being readied on both sides. Polls, after all, are reactive; campaigns are dynamic.

Hard cases

What will be the impact of the hard cases which would fall outside the limits of a proposed restrictive regime? Of underage girls, for example, pregnant and unprepared? What about where the health, as opposed to the life, of the woman is seriously threatened by the pregnancy?

On the other side, would Irish people contemplate a law which enabled – for example – most foetuses with Down syndrome to be aborted? Or abortions on the basis of sex selection?

These are difficult political and, for most people, moral questions. The campaigners will certainly not agree on them. Their job will be to convince the middle ground.