Irish Feminists Playing Politics Voted to Stop Women Aborting Dead Babies

The much-debated eighth amendment of the Irish constitution prohibits abortion, even in the cases where women are carrying foetuses with fatal abnormalities. Women are not allowed to abort dead babies thanks to an article meant to protect the unborn. The law was challenged this week by independent feminist TD (MP) for Dublin North, Clare Daly, and got shot down by 104 votes to 20. Weirdly, a lot of the TDs who voted against it are people who identify as feminists.

Right now, if a woman in Ireland finds out she is carrying a baby without a brain or with a defective heart, she if forced to go full-term with the pregnancy, or leave the country for an abortion. Amanda Mellet is one of the women who has been through this.

"I realise that abortion is and will always be highly contentious issue," she said. "But when your baby is not going to live, how can it be justified that a pregnant woman must sneak over to England like a criminal to do what they feel is the most humane thing? I did not go to an abortion clinic. I went to a hospital, was seen by specialists, and the procedure would not have been carried out if there was any hope of survival."

For women like Amanda, leaving the country brings with it health risks and separates people submerged in trauma from their loved ones and their homes. "The morning after giving birth to my stillborn child, I found myself with my husband at the airport standing in an endless queue for our flight home. I was crying, weak, bleeding and light headed, willing myself not to faint for fear they wouldn't let me on the flight. All I could think of was getting home to my own bed where I could bury my head under the covers and sob my eyes out for the loss of my beautiful baby girl. Instead I was sitting on a plane willing myself not to totally fall apart, with Ryanair stewardesses trying to sell me scratch cards and the drunken screeches and squeals of a hen party bound for temple bar behind us."

It's odd that supposed feminists would force women to keep taking Ryanair flights to give birth to dead babies that they desperately wish could have lived, but that's what the TDs of the Labour Party – who agreed with the bill on ethical grounds – seem to have done.

Leading up to the vote, the Attorney General claimed the bill was repugnant to the Irish constitution. That provided the Labour Party with the political cover they needed to whip its TDs into voting against a bill which you might have expected them to support. One of the country's most right-wing parties, Fianna Fail, by contrast, allowed their members to vote whatever way their conscience told them to.

A simple if cynical explanation might lie in political expediency. Over the years, Labour Women have been the champions of abortion rights in Ireland. Now the Labour Party is in a state of collapse, so letting a solitary upstart like Daly steal their thunder might not have been appreciated. There's also the need to not piss off Fine Gael, their socially conservative coalition partners, who were against the bill on principle.

Parliamentary rumours suggest Labour is working on its own legislation to repeal the toxic eighth amendment. If that's true, it looks like their vote against Daly's bill was just so that they can take the credit at a later date, making themselves the heroes in a story of emancipation, when in fact they were obstacles. One Labour TD Anne Ferris, did vote for Daly's bill, breaking the whip. Rumours have it that she will be welcomed back into the party with open arms, so why couldn't more feminist TDs do what she did?

The constitutional technicality was a strange defence anyway. In 2005, when the Irish state was taken to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by "Miss D" – a 17-year-old woman pregnant with a foetus that had no head, who wanted to get an abortion – the case was dismissed because she didn't try to navigate the Irish courts first. It was argued that she could have got an abortion, had she tried to go through the Irish legal system. So, the Irish state said one thing about its constitution when it was taken to court, and the opposite when a TD tried to get a bill passed. Labour's feminist TDs could have called bullshit on the Attorney General and voted with their conscience, but they didn't.

On the other side of the debate, the religious right know exactly where they stand on the issue. Niamh Uí Bhriain, a "pro-Life" activist from the Life Institute told me Daly's bill would cause people to abort children with disabilities. "Clare Daly's modus operandi is to bring forward abortion bill after abortion bill, which the media are currently eagerly using to repeatedly promote abortion for children with disabilities," she said. "It's a calculated attack, but there's a sense that Daly's apparent obsession with abortion is wearing thin with the public who are now hearing more from parents who want to give their babies life, however severe the disability or short the life expectancy."

I put this to Daly, and she hit back, clarifying that her bill was not related to disabilities and instead covered hopeless, fatal cases. "We are dealing with cases where medical practitioners believe that a foetus is incompatible with life – in tragic circumstances where it may have no brain, no skull, no kidneys or a combination of such conditions, which make it not viable that the foetus will be born alive. It has absolutely nothing to do with disabilities," she said.

It would seem while the Life Institute and Labour Women might wield different placards at protests, they both wanted this bill defeated.

This political point scoring by Labour leaves women like Sara in a horrific position. Sara found out late in her pregnancy that her baby had very little or no brain. After months of joyfully feeling her baby kick inside her, she was told by her doctor that this was nothing more than reflex. That unbearable discovery was bad enough, but it was made worse by the cruelty of Ireland's restrictive abortion laws.

"In the shock, I presumed they would take me in straight away and perform a C-section or induce me," she said. "Then, the doctor hit us with something I never imagined I'd ever hear in my life. She said that under catholic law, they could not induce me in Ireland until I was at least 37 weeks gone… That would have meant me walking around for another 11 weeks knowing that my baby was going to die – people asking me when she was due: 'Are ye all set? Have you got the nursery organised?'

"To be honest you would have found me under a bus if I had to go on carrying her, knowing what we knew."

Daly told me the time has come to finally legislate on this without passing the buck. "Many Ministers who are on the record as saying that something needs to be done to address this issue. But who is going to do it? We are the legislators, no one else can deal with these matters. Hiding behind the constitution is not an excuse to violate human rights. We need action on this – it is long overdue," she said.

@normcos

More on abortion rights in Ireland:

The Holy War on Irish Wombs

Ireland Deserves a Referendum on Abortion

VICE News: Abortion Rights in Ireland