#together4yes

“History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.” - Seamus Heaney. (The Cure at Troy, 1991)

Today is the day Ireland votes to either repeal or save the 8th ammendment, which grants the unborn the right to life. This basically means that abortion is illegal in this country and is only permitted under very special circumstances, like being moments away from dying and when I say moments, I mean moments.

Too many women in my country have been denied treatments for various health issues because a previous generation decided that an unborn child, no matter how far along they are, has a bigger right to live than the woman carrying the child. If a woman is caught with abortion pills or is trying to procure an abortion, she and any doctor that may have tried to help her faces up to FOURTEEN YEARS IN PRISON. That sentence is longer than what the father of the child may face if he raped the mother.

If a woman in this country wants an abortion she must travel to another country to be shamed, threatened and insulted by people holding signs outside of a clinic who don't even know her. Afterwards, she cannot seek comfort in her own home until she is back on a plane to this backwards country. Too many women have made this journey.

To any followers I have that also live in Ireland, I urge you to vote YES. Remember, any woman could be in need of an abortion and your vote is what she needs.

She is your teacher.

She is your favourite waitress.

She is the girl who borrowed a pencil off you in art class.

She is your aunt.

She is your neighbour.

She is your friend.

She is your daughter.

She could be you one day.

I don't care if I lose followers for this. In fact, I couldn't give a flying fuck. This is my country and this is MY opinion.

Until the results of the referendum are revealed my blog will look like this and I will only reblog referendum posts. I am still on hiatus but my aesthetics will resume on the 1st or 2nd of June. Thank you for understanding.

#REPEAL

- Wallflower

   In his article for First Things, which describes itself as “America’s most influential journal for religion and public life,” John Waters casts the vote to repeal the 8th amendment to the Irish constitution on May 25th as the death of his country. On that day, he writes, “history seemed to have gone into reverse: the Resurrection behind, Calvary in front. On Friday, the Irish people climbed Calvary backwards, in the name of progress.” I knew from that first line that the Ireland he knows and the Ireland I know must be two very different places. Like most Irish women at home and abroad, I went to sleep the night of May 25th, when exit polls showed that the referendum had passed with 68% of the vote, scarcely allowing myself to believe that I would wake up in a world where Irish women were free. The next morning, though I may have been curled up under my blankets half a world a way in Canada, I felt as though I was with the thousands of women at Dublin Castle who were weeping in joy and relief as the results were made official, alternating between chants of “Yes!” and “Savita,” the name of an Indian immigrant who died of septic shock as a complication of miscarriage in 2012, after being denied an abortion five days earlier and being told “this is a Catholic country,” before breaking into a tearful chorus of Amhran na bhFiann, the national anthem. I spent the next forty-eight hours crying off and on, and I’d be lying if I said the teary spells have stopped completely, almost five days later.    Before I go on, I want to make my opinion on this matter perfectly clear. I am Catholic. Abortion is not an easy topic for me, and I do believe that on some level, it involves the taking of a life. In Canada, the country that sectarian oppression led my family to before I was born, abortion is legal for any reason up to birth. I do not agree with that at all. But in Ireland, the 8th amendment created the opposite extreme- in making the life of the mother and the life of the fetus equal in all respects, women could not even have a termination for medical reasons unless her death was imminent. I say that because a potentially life-threatening situation, such as a lengthy miscarriage, which can lead to sepsis, was not enough to merit a termination- you had to actually be experiencing sepsis in order to be allowed an abortion. This is what killed Savita Halappanavar, the catalyst for this referendum. Personally, I believe that abortion should be allowed if the pregnancy poses risk to the health, including mental health, of the mother; if the baby is diagnosed with a fatal foetal abnormality such as anencephaly; and in cases of rape and incest. However, because I do not believe that anyone should be forced to disclose that they have been a victim of rape or incest in order to access health care, I believe that there should be a period in the first trimester during which abortion can be accessed upon request.    The 8th amendment, however, went beyond prohibiting abortion in all cases. The law undermined the agency of women carrying wanted pregnancies to term, as it prevented women from accessing any sort of health care that may hurt the baby. I read one story of a women who was denied chemotherapy and ultimately died, only for her baby to die three days later. In short, the 8th amendment was a draconian law that shames any nation that considers itself modern. With that in mind, I invite you to take my hand and dive into dissecting Waters’ article. I decided to write this response on a whim at one in the morning, because a lot of things have made me really angry in the last few days, but nothing as much as this article. Let me tell you why.

   Waters opens with “If you would like to visit a place where the symptoms of the sickness of our time are found near their furthest limits, come to Ireland. Here you will see a civilization in freefall, seeking with every breath to deny the existence of a higher authority, a people that has now sentenced itself not to look upon the Cross of Christ lest it be haunted by His rage and sorrow.” From the get-go, he is casting Ireland as some sort of hellish wasteland of sin more akin to Las Vegas than to a country where the Angelus is still broadcast on national TV and every single person I’ve ever met went to a Catholic school. As the western world goes, Ireland is behind the times, and certainly one of the most pious countries among its peers. I’m not saying Ireland has the same levels of religiosity as it did even 50 years ago, but 85% of its citizens identify as Catholic, and the handprint of the Church is all over its laws. In 2009, the Dáil (Parliament) passed a law implementing a €25,000 fine for blasphemy, and children must be baptized Catholic to be admitted into school- that’s the kind of fundamentalism we use to justify bombing Muslim countries. So is Ireland shaking off some of the influence of the Church? Absolutely, and thank God for that. But is it “a civilization in freefall, seeking with every breath to deny the existence of a higher authority?” Absolutely not. Could not be farther from it.    A later paragraph begins with “For the first time in history, a nation has voted to strip the right to life from the unborn.” Is this true? Technically, but only because Ireland is the only country (to my knowledge) to ever have had the legal equality of the life of the mother and her unborn child enshrined in their constitution. That in and of itself ought to tell you something about Irish society- that abortion laws had to be changed by referendum rather than by legislation because an absolute ban was literally enshrined in the constitution.    He continues: “The tenor of the contest has been so nauseating that the deepest parts of my psyche had begun to anticipate this outcome. It was little things: the frivolity of the Yes side: “Run for Repeal”; “Spinning for Repeal”; “Walk your Dog for Repeal”; “Farmers for Yes”; “Grandparents for Repeal,” which ought to have been “Grandparents for Not Having Grandchildren.” This, like the same-sex marriage referendum in 2015, was a carnival referendum: Yessers chanting for Repeal, drinking to Repeal, grinning for the cameras as they went door-to-door on the canvass of death.” Apparently, Waters has a problem with the fact that Irish people live normal lives, and don’t just spend their hours alternatively praying the rosary and making babies, as borderline-Orientalist caricatures from Americans would have you believe. What hurts me the most about this - this denial of normalcy, of modernity, the eschewing of activities such as spin class or walking your dog as something somehow out of reach of the constantly-praying people of the Emerald Isle - is that it comes from an Irishman. Growing up in Canada, I’ve grown used to foreigners, especially Catholics, having this mythologized idea of Irish society, as though time stopped for us in 1849. And I’ve grown used to other Catholics going into hysterics when we step out of line from this fantasy. But seeing someone who describes Ireland as the only home he’s ever known perpetuating the infantilizing and, frankly, almost racist idea that Irish people aren’t, for lack of a better word, normal- I can’t lie, it hurt.    This, for me, has been the crux of the issue as I’ve debated the referendum results with non-Irish Catholics, or (even worse) Catholics of some vague and distant Irish descent, who maybe had a great-great-great grandparent come over on the coffin ships during the Great Hunger. There are 500,000 people of Irish descent in Canada, which makes up 15% of our population; likewise, in the US there are 33 million people who claim Irish descent, which makes up 10.5% of their population and dwarfs the all-island population of Ireland, which is about 6 million. Most of these people, however, are descendants of people who came during the Great Hunger or shortly thereafter. First generation Irish-Canadians (or Irish-Americans) like myself are extremely rare. Because of this, though Irish culture is very strong and certainly privileged in North America, there are few people here with an actual connection to contemporary Ireland. For this reason, the image of Ireland that’s held by “Irish” Catholics here is not realistic.    Not only is Ireland imagined as a place where having 10 children is considered the average and no one has heard of birth control, but they think we actually like it that way. Catholics in North America treat Ireland as a dollhouse; a plaything. Of course, when you base your admiration and connection to a country on nothing but its (imagined) religiosity, you’re apt to want to dissociate yourself from it entirely if its people step out of line. I kid you not- I saw a fully Canadian girl proclaim in light of the passing of the referendum “Today I am not Irish.” Sweetie, relax. You never were. Furthermore, it does not escape me that these attitudes carry a distinct air of colonialism, which is problematic when you consider the fact that many North Americans look at Ireland as a country that only became (mostly) free because the Brits took pity on us and handed us the 26 counties to shut us up.    So it’s bad enough to hear this from people who have never set foot in Ireland, but from someone who lived their his whole life? I felt betrayed. Heartbroken. And like I needed to say something. Like I needed to get the truth about Ireland’s tumultuous and oppressive relationship with the Catholic Church out to as many people as I could. In that moment I felt it became my duty to show the truth that every woman in Ireland knows to the world.

   I can only hope that Waters was purposely misleading his American audience and didn’t actually believe what he said when he wrote “The spiritual reconstruction of Ireland that took place after the Famines of the 1840s placed mothers at its center: the moral instruments by which Irish families were to be brought back to the straight and narrow. Women were placed on a pedestal, their actions or demands immune from questioning by mere men. Add two dashes of feminism and you have an unassailable cultural force, which has now attained its apotheosis. “Trust women,” one of the many fatuous Yes slogans demanded. Trust women to kill their own children?”    Excuse me... WHAT? Placed mothers at its center, immune from questioning by mere men?? I think I need to give you folks a hard dose of truth here. As everyone knows, England occupied and oppressed the people of Ireland for 800 years (and is still occupying and oppressing the people of the North - tiocfaidh ár lá). But what many people don’t know is that, throughout the last hundred years of British rule, the Catholic Church, seen by so many as the vehicle for Ireland’s resistance, was available to the highest bidder, which was the colonial administration every time. During the Great Hunger, which was not in fact a famine but a purposely orchestrated genocide, the Church was more than happy to let the people of Ireland starve, with nothing in the way of help besides promises that you would spend eternity in Hell if you accepted a bowl of soup from the Quakers. When Ireland won independence for the 26 counties in 1921, its dreams of self-determination were dashed by the Church, which quickly stepped into England’s place of controlling every aspect of our lives. No one had to carry this burden more than Irish mothers.    From the 18th century until 1996, women considered “fallen” were put into Magdalene laundries- homes run by nuns, ostensibly with the intention of rehabilitating these girls into better Catholics. After the 1920s, the laundries took a turn from bad to disgusting, essentially becoming prison labour camps for all sorts of women- disabled women, petty criminals, and girls who were considered “loose,” but mostly unwed mothers. Here, these women were forced to perform hard physical labour up until and immediately following birth. Their children were taken from them immediately and sold to American families. Many of these women and children never saw each other again. Unable to see their babies, women endured the torture of not being able to express their breast milk, and were beaten for crying or complaining. The babies who died were buried in mass graves on unconsecrated ground. At one Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, 796 babies were discovered buried inside a septic tank. The Bon Secours Home in Tuam operated from 1925 to 1961- this is not something out of pre-Industrial history. This happened within my parents’ lifetime.    The domination of the Church in all areas of life meant that up until the 1980s c-sections were not performed in Ireland. Instead, difficult labours were handled with symphysiotomies- essentially the surgical breaking of the mother’s pelvis. This was done widely throughout Ireland and without consent. Women often were not told that it had been done until after their babies were delivered. So much for women’s “actions or demands immune from questioning by mere men.”    Ireland, I am proud to say, has come a long way in the last few decades. In 1980, condoms became legal, and within my lifetime, the last Magdalene laundry closed and divorce, gay marriage, and emergency contraception were decriminalized. But the 8th amendment, inserted into the constitution in 1983, remained a major roadblock to women’s liberation. I wish I could say that I am sure that the people who wrote the 8th amendment did so innocently, without realizing how many women would die because of it and how many families it would traumatize, but looking at Ireland’s history, I can’t say I have that much faith that our institutions care about women.    Savita Halappanavar is the most high profile case of the damage caused by the 8th amendment, but she is far from the only one. The lead-up to the referendum was defined by stories like hers, some from women who were lucky to survive, and some from the families of women who weren’t. Another famous story is that of Miss P, a pregnant woman who in 2014 was declared clinically braindead, but whose doctors refused to unplug her from life support because it would kill her baby. Her family, having just lost their daughter, wife, and mother, was forced to appeal to Ireland’s High Court so that she could be removed from life support and die and be buried with dignity. The court ultimately ruled in the family’s favour, but only because her baby had no prospect of surviving- not because using a brain dead woman as a baby incubator is fundamentally wrong and disgusting. Another section of stories that particularly touched me were those of families who received the devastating diagnosis of fatal foetal anomaly. One woman, after discovering that her baby had anencephaly (the absence of a major portion of the brain and skull), was told by her doctor “it’s going to be a long 20 weeks.” Many of these women and families made the decision to travel to England for a termination- a lonely and harrowing experience, which more often than not involved getting back on a plane the next day or even that night, still bleeding from the procedure and receiving their baby’s ashes in the mail three weeks later.

   Waters begins to wrap up his article by stating about the image of Ireland as the Land of Saints and Scholars, “We now know it to be a legend long past its use-by date. The Irish of today are more likely to be among the looters and book-burners, the barbarians who value nothing but what is expedient.” He is both right and wrong. Ireland is indeed no longer a land of saints and scholars- but why should it be? That was a title given to us based on our history before the year 1000 AD. No other country in the world is expected to stagnate as Ireland is expected to. No one chides France for no longer being a country of crusaders, or China for abandoning its emperor. It’s worth noting that the Land of Saints and Scholars is a title given to us by foreigners, not by us ourselves. No country is single-faceted. Ireland was never just a land of saints and scholars; we are, and always have been, like every other country, a dynamic place. A changing place. A living place.    Where Waters is wrong is his second sentence- looters, book-burners, barbarians. The only people who ought to be ashamed to call themselves Irish, the only people who disgrace their ancestors, are those who speak of their own people in this way. Book-burners? Trinity College Dublin is one of the top universities in Europe, where anyone can go and view the immaculately preserved Book of Kells. Barbarians? In the last 100 years, Ireland has invented the defibrillator, the ejection seat, the nickel-zinc battery, and radiotherapy. Does finally shaking off the oppressive shackles of the Church make us, and us women in particular, book-burning barbarians? Is Ireland’s worth based entirely on the degree of control held over it by Catholicism?    Ireland is doubtlessly changing, but anyone who thinks that that change is for the worse rather than the better needs to check up on their history. There is a reason that Irish women from Dublin Castle to the Midlands to the Aran Islands and from Ontario to New York to Australia greeted the 26th of May with tears in our eyes and joy in our hearts. Those who attempt to make this referendum about abortion on demand and attempt to paint us as celebrating the death of our children are being willfully ignorant to the fact that this referendum was centred heavily not on abortion on demand but on women like Savita Halappanavar, who came to our country seeking a better life only to die too young because of the stranglehold the Church has on our society. Waters mocks the slogan “Trust women,” but that is really what this was all about. For 200 years, Irish women have been entirely robbed of our agency and our voice. Like Taoiseach (a word that I, unlike Waters, am not embarrassed to utter) Varadkar made clear, this week Ireland spoke loud and clear, telling the world that we are a compassionate country, that we are a dynamic country, and that most importantly, we are a country that trusts women.    According to Waters, this referendum was a backwards walk from the Resurrection towards Cavalry, from life towards death. He could not be more wrong. The promise of the Resurrection brings to us a new day, a new dawn, a future where we are free from the shackles that previously held us down. In my eyes, and in the eyes of the vast majority of Irish men and women alike, May 25th was the beginning of a new Ireland. We turned our back on centuries of pain, suffering, and death, and took our first steps towards the light of compassion. May 25th was not a backward walk to Calvary- May 25th was a Resurrection.

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For Savita. I’m sorry we let you down.

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