Complacency may be undoing of repeal campaign

I have spent the past four years studying, researching and talking about abortion. I’ve met abortionists, their assistants, people who have had abortions and people who have prosecuted illegal abortionists.

On one memorable occasion I spent an afternoon at a high security prison with an abortionist who also happened to be America’s most prolific serial killer. He sang a French love song to my wife and kept touching her leg.

The song was Jacques Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don't Leave Me). We did leave him. Rather quickly, as it happens.

And so I have had quite the interest in the current referendum campaign to repeal the Eight Amendment banning abortion.

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I know the polls predict a win for Repeal but I’m just not seeing it. Of course living so far from the fray it’s possible I’m missing something, but no matter where I look and who I talk to I see and hear a campaign that is in trouble.

Take Twitter – it is an awful place a lot of the time but it is where some people argue and spread information in real time. At first glance it looked like the pro-life side were dominating the argument. A lot of leading Repealers may be young urban types but, unusually for that demographic, they didn’t seem very active on Twitter.

So I tried to follow more relevant people but found I was actually blocked by many prominent Repealers and many not so prominent campaigners. What could I have done to provoke such a comprehensive blocking?

Then I saw an article in the UK Wired magazine about the "Repeal Shield" list, Subscribe to the Shield and everyone listed is automatically blocked by your Twitter account and you never have to interact with them or even see their arguments.

Echo chamber

That’s right. As some polls show support for Repeal dropping, the Repeal side is putting resources into making sure their supporters never have to engage with, argue with or persuade those on the other side or even those who could be persuadable but still have doubts.

Many political campaigns are accused of operating in an echo chamber but Repeal is the only one I have ever heard of where they have actually deliberately made it a strategy.

According to friends, there is a similar lack of engagement at street level. In Dublin posters from both sides are common but outside the cities its seems to be pro-life posters all the way.

Another friend who is a local journalist said he knows many of the TDs he meets are pro-Repeal but not going public because they fear a backlash at the next election.

This failure to engage with people who have genuine doubts might end up being fatal to the Repeal campaign. People have real problems with abortion that cannot be wished away.

What do you say to those who argue that abortion is used to “wipe out” Down syndrome children in some countries? And what about sex selection where in some countries there are now huge gender imbalances because abortion is used to stop girls being born because some families view them as lesser citizens?

Blocking people who raise these questions on Twitter doesn’t make the questions go away – it just reveals that you don’t have satisfactory answers and makes them really interested in finding out more.

And, speaking from personal experience, the more information one has about abortion the more doubts you have. This is the pattern in America where the Republican Party went from mostly supporting the legalisation of abortion in the 1970s to become anti-abortion 40 years later.

And perhaps even more surprisingly, surveys show that millennials are more anti-abortion than their parents. Again this is probably due to information that their parents didn’t have when they decided to support abortion. It is impossible to put a Repeal Shield or any other shield around ultra-sound pictures of millennial’s brothers and sisters in the womb. They are on the fridge of so many American houses and have been for years.

Ultra-sound images

It’s not surprising a generation that grew up celebrating the foetus and how human it is are now hesitating about supporting destroying it at will.

Americans have had many more years of looking at ultra-sounds than Irish people and they have had many more years of abortions. They really know what a foetus looks like and they know they were promised abortion would be “safe legal and rare” a phrase just recently repeated by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Since legalisation, Americans have had 60 million abortions. That’s not rare and that’s 60 million ultra-sound pictures that have never been developed.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the polls are right and the Repeal side doesn’t need to put up posters and it doesn’t need to engage with those who disagree with it. I’ve recently lived through a contentious election in the United States where one of the sides didn’t really like campaigning.

Hillary Clinton basically took August off and didn't visit the crucial state of Wisconsin once. In the election book Shattered, authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes recount how Bill Clinton regularly phoned Robby Mook, the young campaign manager, to berate him and warn him they were not paying enough attention to the white working class, the "silent majority".

In one memorable rebuke, Mook put his shield up and told Clinton, a liberal Democrat who was twice elected governor of Arkansas and president of the United States that “the data runs counter to your anecdotes”.

Maybe the data runs counter to my anecdotes about absent posters and non-existent canvassers. Maybe. Or maybe be prepared for some very forlorn-looking Repeal campaigners walking in the woods outside Dublin this summer.

Phelim McAleer is an Irish journalist based in Los Angeles. Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer is screening in Dublin on Monday and Galway on Tuesday