Twenty years after the Eighth Amendment dealing with abortion, Goretti Horgan reflects on whether its opponents got their tactics wrong.
Ireland was another country in 1983 when the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by referendum. I had forgotten how bad it was until I pulled out newspaper clippings and magazines from 1982-3, the years of the Anti-Amendment Campaign (AAC).
Girls who had benefited from the introduction of free secondary education in 1966 and of university grants in the 1970s were now women in their mid-20s wanted more than their mothers had had. They wanted to work outside the home and expected equal pay. They had access, if with some difficulty, to contraception. They were starting to leave unhappy marriages. More and more were refusing to give up babies born outside marriage. Large numbers were going to England to end unwanted pregnancies.
The early 1980s was also a time of global recession. Unemployment was rising. Women who left unhappy marriages and became unemployed discovered they had no right to social welfare.
It was March 1982 before Róisín Conroy's High Court case forced the Department of Social Welfare to recognise the existence of separated women. As job losses grew, mainstream politicians questioned the right of married women to work. There were suggestions that the Employment Equality Act, which made discrimination against married women illegal, be changed.
The economic crisis was matched by a political crisis. There were three general elections between June 1981 and October 1982. The three main party leaderships were unable to resist pressure from the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC).
Fine Gael and the Labour Party soon regretted their acquiescence to the PLAC agenda, but too late. PLAC had a simple message: if you're against abortion on demand, you have to support a constitutional amendment banning all abortion.
The PLAC proposal amounted to an attempt by the Catholic right to reverse advances made by women. Some of the amendment's strongest proponents admitted that it wasn't intended to promote real debate on abortion.
The Anti-Amendment Campaign (AAC) was set up in April 1982, mainly to oppose the idea of a referendum. If a referendum was called, the AAC would campaign for a No vote on the basis that the amendment: would do nothing to solve the problem of unwanted pregnancies; would allow for no exceptions; would be sectarian; would impede further discussion and possible legislation on abortion; was a waste of public funds.
The steering committee of the campaign was an uneasy alliance - revolutionary socialists rubbed shoulders with at least two future judges. On the ground, the campaign was not just anti-amendment but overwhelmingly pro-choice. The local action groups were made up of people already involved in some way in trying to build a better, more tolerant country. All were clear that this was about more than the abortion issue.
Looking back, it was a tactical mistake to have concentrated so much on stopping the referendum. That, and the fact that we had a whole range of sometimes complicated arguments against the amendment, weakened us.
PLAC was clear that the vote was about abortion. Most Anti-Amendment Campaign literature said it was about everything but. We could and should have been more audacious. On the doorsteps many who started out describing themselves as "anti-abortion" were willing to reconsider when faced with concrete examples - "Of course a woman who has been raped . . . who is very young . . . who is menopausal . . .who already has five or six kids..."
In the end, we lost 66 per cent/33 per cent - decisive but a vast improvement on early opinion polls.
Through the 1980s and 1990s we saw many of our fears realised. The 1988 injunction won by SPUC against Open Line Counselling and Dublin Well Woman made the provision of information about abortion illegal. Books like Our Bodies Ourselves and Miriam Stoppard's Everywoman's Life Guide were removed from Dublin city libraries.
One of the effects was women from Ireland having later abortions as they found it increasingly difficult to get in contact with clinics in England. Then, in 1992, the Amendment was used by the Attorney General to stop Miss X, a 14-year-old rape victim, from travelling to England for an abortion.
The thousands who took to the streets about the X case showed that while the Catholic right had won the battle over the Eighth Amendment, it hadn't won the war over abortion. Faced with a real young woman, the country said "Of course she has a right to an abortion". In each of two referendums since, voters have refused to allow a rolling back on the victory for women in the X case.
Twenty years on from the Eighth Amendment, thousands of women are still travelling to England for abortions while the poorest women are forced to continue pregnancies they would end if they could raise the money. Politicians avert their eyes and refuse to legislate even to ensure that the next Miss X can have an abortion in Ireland.
There is no doubt that the Anti-Amendment Campaign made a difference. For all its faults, it provided the first major resistance to the forces of Catholic reaction. It said we're not going back - back to the Magdalen laundries, shotgun weddings and the gross hypocrisy our parents had to endure. We kept the door open for the more tolerant Ireland we live in today.
Goretti Horgan was National Organiser of the Anti-Amendment Campaign 1982-83. She now works as a researcher on child poverty and disability issues.