Repost: On the 25th November 1992 over a million Irish voters, 62% of those who voted, voted Yes to the 13th amendment to the Irish constitution. This was to give the right to travel to Irish citizens, which in the context of the day was primarily a right to seek an abortion in the UK or elsewhere.
In other words, the Irish people voted that day not against abortion as a practice, but merely as a practice to be carried out HERE. We specifically inserted into our constitution a provision to ensure that the state would not attempt to prevent the procuring of an abortion by an Irish citizen. When other countries ask are you pro-life or pro-choice, we ask WHERE will the procedure be carried out? How Flann O’Brien of us.
Of course, some pro-lifers argue that it is not practical to stop Irish women seeking an abortion abroad. Why then did we have to pass a constitutional amendment to specifically prevent the government from doing that? We did it exactly because an Attorney General tried to do it, and we were mortified at him taking all this right to life of the unborn stuff seriously, making a show of us in front of the Brits and everybody else.
I genuinely am conflicted as to where I stand on abortion, but I’ll tell you one thing: nothing makes my stomach churn faster than watching alleged pro-life Irish politicians dance the popular No Abortion Here jig, and then go all quiet when asked about defending the unborn being exported for abortion. They go all quiet because they know that most Irish people are not pro-life but geographical abortionists, cherishing the unborn until the moment the Ryanair boarding pass is handed over. If they really believed, they’d be advocating a reversal of the 13th amendment and a law making it a criminal offence to seek an abortion abroad. But that would conflict with the look-the-other-way values of the Irish people.
It’s an awful pity hypocrisy isn’t an Olympic sport, because we’d be weighed down with medals.