Irish Parliament Oks Bill Allowing Dispersal Of Abortion Information
When women in this staunchly Roman Catholic nation want an abortion, they are forced to cross the Irish Sea to England.
Irish laws forbid doctors or clinics from doing abortions. Until Friday, they were even forbidden to offer women information on obtaining abortions.
Lawmakers in the Dail, the 166-seat Parliament, approved the first loophole in Ireland’s blanket ban on abortion. Their “information” bill allows doctors to provide names and addresses of English family-planning clinics to pregnant clients.
Women still must cross the Irish Sea, but they now can travel with a legally-obtained address in hand.
“It’s just so hypocritical,” said Deirdre Smith, a Dublin news vendor. “We can’t face the reality of abortion, so we export it to England.”
Smith was hawking copies of Friday’s Evening Standard, which carried an “ABORTION BILL PASSED” headline.
Ironically, that competed with the Evening Press’ “WOMAN QUIZZED ON DEAD BABY” which dealt with suspicions that a teenager killed an unwanted child, a crime that has in the past been committed by Irish women who had been denied abortions.
The Roman Catholic Church hierarchy bitterly fought the bill, which is the first crack in Ireland’s centuriesold anti-abortion legislation. More than 90 percent of Ireland’s 3.5 million people identify themselves as Catholics.
The bill - facing expected approval next week by the largely symbolic upper tiers of government, the Senate and President Mary Robinson - marks a change in attitudes toward the estimated 4,500 women who travel overseas for abortions each year.
It also caps three years of acrimonious debate that ignited when a High Court judge barred a 14-year-old girl who had been raped by a family friend from traveling overseas for an abortion.
That case produced an international furor, and forced a complex public referendum in November 1992. Voters elected to amend the constitution’s anti-abortion clause to allow women the right to seek information on overseas abortion services and to travel there.
Travel since then has been legal, but allowing information required legislation.