It’s not only in Ireland that we need a new view on abortion | Sarah Ditum

Dublin might be preparing for change, but in Poland and elsewhere women’s rights are under threat

Before the end of May, Ireland will hold a referendum that could finally give Irish women legal access to abortion in their own country. It feels like the time is right for change. The taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, who made the announcement last week, called himself “pro-life” as recently as 2015; now he says he’ll be campaigning against the repressive eighth amendment that values a foetus’s right to life equally with a pregnant woman’s (or, in the language of the constitution, the “unborn” and the “mother”). It’s a stunning and very welcome reversal.

It’s also overdue. Any change in the law will be too late for Savita Halappanavar, who died of sepsis in 2012 after doctors refused to terminate the pregnancy she was already miscarrying. Too late, too, for the unnamed migrant, pregnant by rape, who was denied an abortion and then legally forced to give birth by caesarean at 25 weeks in 2014. Too late for the thousands of women each year who have had to travel to England to end their pregnancies, some unwanted and some very much wanted but agonisingly unviable; too late for the uncounted others who were never able to make the trip.

Continue reading... February 04, 2018 at 05:35AM