Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Ireland is gearing up for a war between Church and state over abortion (Opinion)

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.