Access to Abortion in Ireland—A Key Human Rights Issue

(Originally published by the National Women's Council of Ireland)

Last week, Human Rights Watch launched our most recent report on women's rights -- "A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland". The report was based on interviews and research we conducted in Dublin, Cork, London, Birmingham, and Washington DC in mid 2008. And though the word "abortion" features prominently in the title, the report is about much more than abortion.

It is about the thousands of women who face crisis pregnancies every year in Ireland. And above all, it is about a government that actively sabotages their health.

Through our interviews with women who had traveled abroad for abortions, with medical practitioners, and with social workers, we documented the consistent obstacles women and girls face to independent and responsible decision-making about their pregnancies. They are not allowed to access the services they need within Ireland, they are aggressively discouraged from seeking the care they need abroad, and they cannot trust that the advice they receive is accurate or complete. Indeed, at the most basic level, the report is about information.

And to demonstrate just how important information can be, I want you to imagine a woman with a crisis pregnancy.

Perhaps she is one of the girls who got pregnant as a result of sexual abuse. Perhaps she is a married woman with 3 existing children and cannot afford to feed a fourth. Perhaps she is a student. Or a refugee going through an asylum procedure. Or perhaps she feels that something is not quite right with her pregnancy, health-wise.

Either way, she is a woman who believes she cannot and must not carry her pregnancy to term. But where can she turn?

Often, she may not know. The government has made sure that information about the termination of pregnancies remains difficult to access -- even information about how to get information about the termination of a pregnancy.

Those who provide accurate information about abortions abroad cannot advertise broadly and are prevented, by law, from supporting their patients in seeking care.

Meanwhile, those agencies who claim not to provide information about abortion remain unregulated, and therefore free to harass women and girls who are already in distress with harrowing medical claims many of which are completely inaccurate.

In many cases, the agencies that provide accurate information are indistinguishable from those that don't.

Worse still, women who depend on maternity hospitals and GPs for support also cannot be sure to get full information. Despite an exception in the law, clarified by the Supreme Court, that women have a right to an abortion within Ireland if their life is threatened by the pregnancy, there is no official protocol on when abortion might be legally performed in Ireland. Mostly doctors are reluctant to guess, and some, as a result, actively discourage pregnant women with complicated pregnancies from seeking full information about their health status: they can't do anything about it anyway.

Some might say: if the government's intention is to discourage women from having abortions, it looks as if their policy is working.

They would be wrong. Thousands of women and girls travel abroad for abortions every year. They are not prevented by the misleading or scarce information from seeking abortions. They are preventing from seeking abortions in a timely manner. This has a detrimental effect on their health, both physically and mentally.

Abortion, as a medical procedure, is safest when provided within the first 8 weeks of the pregnancy. And the longer a woman with a crisis pregnancy has to wait for the services she needs, the deeper her distress and ordeal. If the woman is suffering through a pregnancy with fatal fetal abnormalities or that has been the result of rape or incest, this is in some cases even more true. By stalling women's access to the care they need, the Irish government is complicit in their distress.

In other words: the government contributes directly to undermining women's health, dignity, and human rights. Because though decisions related to abortion are complicated and deeply personal, they are also a question of human rights. And the Irish government has an obligation to provide women with the support and information they need to navigate those decisions.