Time for a grown-up abortion debate
Pro-choice and pro-life campaigners have been ramping up their campaigns lately. But there’s no use in Ireland burying its collective head in the sand any longer. With women continuing to travel abroad for terminations, the time has come for the status quo to be challenged.
Adrienne Murphy, 05 Oct 2012
Medical advances and the changing debate
Mother-of-one, Mara Clarke, a citizen of the United States of America, is the founder of the UK-based Abortion Support Network (ASN), a volunteer-run charity that provides financial assistance, accommodation in volunteer homes, and confidential, non-judgmental information to women in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland who want to travel to England to access a safe and legal abortion. A woman with courage and integrity, Clarke talks to me about abortion on her mobile as she travels on a London bus, between two meetings.
“The Department of Health here has reported that over the past seven years, there’s been a continual decrease in the numbers of women travelling from Ireland to the UK for abortions,” she explains. “The Irish Family Planning Association says the drop is due to increased access to contraception and better sex education, and these may well be factors. But we feel that the numbers of women living in Ireland having abortions are very under-reported, because they only reflect the women who are giving Irish addresses in British clinics.”
This is where the combination of guilt, shame and illegality come in.
“Some women may be giving the addresses of the places where they’re staying in England, or the addresses of friends,” she adds. “Nor do the figures take into account the women from Ireland who are blagging themselves free terminations on the UK National Health Service (NHS). And they don’t count the women who go to other countries, sometimes as far away as Russia, for surgical abortions. Or the women who are having medically-induced abortions within Ireland through the use of abortion pills, which they’re buying online.”
The truth is that medical advances are changing the nature of the debate around abortion – but there is a desperate effort to obscure that fact and to deny Irish women the benefit of the new pharmaceutical options (see Women on Web). In the meantime, it is the same old story for those women who are confronted with the reality of an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy.
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