The latest Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI opinion poll has shown a sharp drop in support for repealing the Eighth Amendment. Asked if they would vote in favour or against removing the Eighth Amendment, 47 per cent of voters say they will vote Yes, while 28 per cent said they would vote no. This represents a nine-point drop in support for repeal since January. Those who said they were not sure how they would vote were at 20 per cent, an increase of five per cent since last January. Three per cent said they would not vote and one per cent refused to give an opinion.
Responding to the poll, spokesperson for Savethe8th, Niamh UiBhriain said it confirms that the more people get to know about the consequences of a Yes vote, the less likely they are to vote for repeal. She noted that a third of those currently saying they will vote yes believe the proposal for unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks goes too far. “Most importantly, we believe that when they find out that this proposal would also allow the abortion of a healthy baby, on UK style grounds, at 6 months gestation, many of those voters will reconsider their votes,” she said.
The Love Both campaign welcomed the poll and said the findings are “a devastating blow to the Government’s referendum proposal.”
A woman who died following a late-stage abortion procedure was discharged from the clinic despite vomiting and swaying so much she looked “drunk”, an inquest has heard. Aisha Chithira, 31, travelled to England from Ireland to have an abortion at a Marie Stopes clinic in London, in 2012.
She suffered a tear to her uterus during the “blind” procedure performed under anaesthetic, as a surgeon struggled to dismember the 22-week-old foetus and remove the parts from the woman’s womb.
Afterwards she vomited in a stairwell and complained of feeling unwell to her husband, but was helped into a taxi by staff at the clinic. They had told her she could not stay overnight. One of the nurses denied they had pressured her to leave because they had wanted to go home. Corinne Slingo, representing Marie Stopes, said: “The taxi driver says he saw his passenger walking out of the building. He was quite shocked, she didn’t seem with it at all.
“She looked like she was drunk.” Reading from a statement, she added: “The nurse got her in a hug and she said ‘don’t do that, you will break my bones’.”
A sex education Bill co-sponsored by hard left TD, Ruth Coppinger, passed the second stage of the legislative process yesterday when it was approved by the Dail without being put to a vote. The Bill, if passed, would force schools to teach a certain model of relationships and sexuality education regardless of ethos including about abortion. A minimum of 10 TDs must want a vote for one to take place, but only two deputies rose to oppose the bill when it was put the the House. It will now be sent to a committee for closer legislative scrutiny, although, because it is a private member’s Bill it is likely to languish without progress.
One of the main campaigning groups against repeal of the 8th amendment, Love Both, launched their campaign in Dublin yesterday. Numerous speakers hammered home the point that repeal would be followed by “abortion on demand” and the only way to stop that would be to vote “No”. Love Both legal consultant Caroline Simons said if the Eighth Amendment is repealed, “Ireland will go from being a country that protects unborn babies to one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world”. She continued: “The Government’s referendum proposal is even more frightening than England’s abortion law, where 1 in every 5 babies loses his or her life to abortion. If repeal happens, the Government is committed to legislating for unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks. The proposed legislation also allows for abortion on vague and undefined ‘health’ grounds, up to viability and even up to birth where the baby has a possible terminal illness and in other circumstances as well”.
Ms Simons said that voters need to be aware of the extreme nature of the abortion regime thay would get post-repeal. “Voters who support abortion in so-called limited circumstances need to know that what they hope for with repeal and what they’d get are two entirely different things. A vote for repeal is a vote for abortion on demand. It didn’t have to be this way. The Government could have chosen to amend the Eighth Amendment for so-called hard cases, while leaving some form of protection for unborn babies in the Constitution. But instead they opted for a proposal that takes away all meaningful protections from unborn babies and allows abortion on demand”.
She concluded with a plea: “The only way to stop this from happening is to ‘VOTE NO’ on 25th May”.
Fianna Fáil has said it will not support a Solidarity private members’ bill on sex education in schools that would trample the right of schools and parents to decide for themselves the content of such courses.
The ‘Provision of Objective Sex Education Bill’, which was debated in the Dáil on Wednesday, purports to guarantee to students a right to receive factual and objective relationships and sexuality education without regard to the school’s ethos and would contain provisions for education on consent, on different types of sexuality and different types of gender, on methods of contraception, and on abortion.
Previously, the the Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment recommended a review of sexual health and relationship education in primary and post-primary schools, colleges, youth clubs and other organisations.
Fianna Fáil’s education spokesman Thomas Byrne said he was concerned that the Bill would result in changes to the “characteristic spirit of schools” and had been drafted without consulting education partners. He said that curriculum issues should not be set in legislation: “we have a principled objection to this Bill on the basis that Ireland has never legislated in law for a curriculum of any type”. He added: “We have never put in law what should be taught in our classes. We have left it to teachers and other experts to decide, and politicians have not got involved.”
Repealing the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution will constitute consent for Ireland to have a “liberal abortion regime”, the Save the 8th campaign has said.
Speaking on The Irish Times’s Inside Politics podcast, the campaign’s communications director, John McGuirk, said many people were unaware of the implications of a vote for repeal. Most voters believed they were supporting legislation allowing for abortions in cases of rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormalities, not terminations of “healthy babies of healthy mothers up to 12 weeks and beyond”, he claimed. The legislation outlined by the Government would allow unrestricted abortion for the first three months of pregnancy, and abortion on vague ‘mental health’ grounds up to the sixth month of pregnancy. That mental health ground accounts for 98% of the abortions carried out in the UK where there is one abortion for every four live births.
The Save the 8th campaign has called on Irish television stations to show a video-scan of a living, child in the womb at 12 weeks gestation as part of their referendum coverage. The video is featured in a social media campaign promoted to Facebook users over the age of 18 in Ireland.
Speaking about the campaign, Save the 8th’s Niamh Ui Bhriain said: “It is important that this debate is informed and that people have access to basic information. The Government is asking us to legalise abortion for any reason up to three months”.
Ms Ui Bhriain said a fully informed debate need not show graphic images, or upsetting images, but it should show, at a very basic level, what a child in the womb at that age looks like. “Every mother who has had a child in the modern era has seen one of these scans – but most voters have not. The scan shows clearly a developing child, with the identifiable form of a human being, moving and kicking inside the womb”.
She said the Irish people are being asked to give their approval for a proposal that would allow such children to be legally killed. She added that, while many people believe that at 12 weeks, they are voting on “a clump of cells”, the simplest look at a 12 week scan proves this to be untrue.
She concluded: “We are calling on RTE and TV3 to include a video of such a scan in their television coverage of the referendum campaign. If they want a fully informed electorate, they will do so.”
