Most citizens don’t want another bitter abortion debate. They want practical solutions to a few real problems, like what to do when a woman is raped or when a couple must cope with severe foetal abnormality.
So the Citizens’ Assembly that meets for the first time today should do us a favour and get on with it. Its job is not to square the circle. It cannot keep everyone happy.
We already know what most people want. A reliable Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll has shown this month that more than half the voters would repeal the Eighth Amendment for limited reasons, in cases of rape and fatal foetal abnormality. Most Irish people recoil from abortion on demand or as a form of post-conception birth control.
The Citizens' Assembly, chaired by Ms Justice Mary Laffoy, must focus on providing for women who face those hard choices. And it can do so quickly. It should avoid a long wrangle.
Slogans are unhelpful. “Repeal the Eighth” has a ring to it. But its right-on, emotional appeal covers a multitude.
Under the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, adopted by voters in 1983, “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”
Practical changes
This provision stands in the way of people who want practical changes to provide for women who have been raped but whose lives are not in danger. It also stands in the way of a more permissive abortion regime like that of England, favoured by just under one in five voters here.
The Citizens' Assembly can help by specifying what changes it believes voters will tolerate. It should leave it to the Oireachtas to decide whether a new Article in the Constitution is needed to replace the Eighth, or merely the deletion of Article Eight following publication of draft legislation that specifies when abortion will be allowed.
Almost one in five voters want no change. The anti-abortion lobby likes to style itself “pro-life”, as if all who disagree with it are anti-life. But life is not black and white.
In the past, Irish Catholic bishops have lent their weight to Constitutional campaigns. Some Catholic members of the Citizens’ Assembly will need to decide if Catholics can in good conscience hold more than one position on abortion (depending on circumstances). If they decide not, they may still accept that not all citizens are Catholic.
The power of Rome in Irish politics has waned, but there is another foreign influence of which the Citizens' Assembly should be just as wary. This is multinational money, spent by people or groups who see a strategic role for Ireland in setting the example they wish would be followed elsewhere.
Such money was spent when Irish people debated referenda on divorce, the EU and marriage equality. It appears now that a foundation associated with liberal billionaire George Soros has given money to Amnesty International Ireland and others for propaganda to help repeal the Eighth Amendment.
Narrow legal grounds
As a long-term member of Amnesty I find this unwise. And what of Amnesty’s failure on narrow legal grounds to address the welfare of the growing human in the womb (or “implanted embryo” as their rich sponsor seems to prefer) while trumpeting “reproductive rights”?
Amnesty should stick to its brief of helping prisoners of conscience, and avoid positions on abortion except perhaps in the case of rape or criminal penalties.
The Citizens’ Assembly can work quickly, and largely on paper, to address the real needs of women who must now travel abroad for abortions when they have been raped or when they are told of a potentially fatal foetal abnormality. In such cases abortion may be the lesser of two evils. It can be left to women themselves to decide in conscience in such cases what is preferable.
To say this is not to agree that it is always “a woman’s right to chose”. This is another vacuous slogan, one that has meaning only if one does not believe that the human being in the womb is also a person – and a slogan denying consensual fathers any role in respect to a life that they have created.
From an early stage in pregnancy the human being in a womb has an active life, and his or her personality is already being shaped physically and psychologically. He or she is the person who emerges from the womb to grow into adulthood. We were all there.
Instead of getting tied up in knots over technical or scientific matters concerning the precise point as which life in the womb begins, or legal questions about the best wording of any new constitutional provision or abortion Bill, the 99 “representative” citizens who meet in Dublin Castle today for the first time should set themselves a short deadline to dispose of this matter practically.