The Irish government has announced
that it’s going to push through legislation to legalise abortion. It
will repeal existing legislation that makes an abortion a criminal
offense and introduce regulations that say a doctor can perform an
abortion if a woman’s life is regarded as being “at risk” – including if
she’s "suicidal".
The semantics of “suicidal” are suspicious. This
could turn in to the old “risk to the woman’s health” formula that many
countries use and is vague enough to allow abortion on demand.
Whatever
the result, this is a watershed moment for Ireland. Its political
establishment has distanced itself from the country’s Catholic heritage
and from the pro-life tradition. Taoiseach Enda Kenny fancies himself as
a new Luther.
A few immediate observations.
First, the catalyst for this reform was
the story of Savita Halappanavar, a woman who went to hospital
suffering from a miscarriage, was denied a termination, and later died.
Pro-abortion campaigners have used her case to claim that Ireland’s laws
kill – that the refusal of an abortion on the grounds of Catholic
chauvinism led directly to her passing.
But the facts of the case are not that certain.
Ireland does theoretically allow abortion under certain cases when the
mother’s life is at risk, and it’s not even clear that a termination
would have saved Savita's life. Worryingly, pro-abortion activists had
access to the details of her case before they were released by the
press. It smacks of politicising a tragedy for the sake of change – and
it seems to have worked.
Second, Ireland is changing – or, at least, its establishment is. In
previous years, Enda Kenny would have been taking a big risk doing this.
During the 2011 election, his party said that it opposed the
legalisation of abortion, in deference to Ireland's Catholic culture.
Not only has he U-turned on that, but he’s also said that he won’t allow
his party a free vote on the subject. Nor presumably will there be a
referendum – a great Irish tradition whereby the political class tries
to liberalise the country by decree and then the people vote it down.
Kenny – conservative in the same way that David Cameron and Ted Kennedy
are conservatives – has tried to define himself as a modernising Prime
Minister who will drag his country into the bright future of sexual
liberation and a Church decoupled from government. In the past that
would have left him politically vulnerable to Ireland’s fair-weather
populism.
We might have expected Fianna Fail (which is rebounding in the
polls) to exploit the switch and challenge him on it. But, this time
around, FF is broadly in favour of reform, too. All the mainstream
parties are gambling that Ireland has become far more liberal and a lot
less Catholic in the wake of the paedophile scandal. The old, reliable
conservatism is gone.
Any credible opposition will come not from within the Dail but from
outside, from the Catholic Church and the large (and rather youthful)
pro-life lobby. And so, for the first time in a very long time, we’re
set for a serious war between Ireland’s political establishment and its
dwindling Catholic faithful.