THIS WEEK’S OPENING in Belfast of the Marie Stopes sexual- and
reproductive-health clinic, which will offer early medical abortions to
eligible clients, has sparked an intense and emotive debate in Northern
Ireland. The most heated arguments have been between religiously motivated anti-abortion supporters – both Catholic and Protestant – and pro-choice campaigners, who largely speak from a secular, rights-based perspective.
The bigger picture appears to show a chasm between traditional social conservatism and a new, progressive liberalism in the North, with unexpected alliances being formed beyond the old sectarian divisions.
The truth may be more complicated than that. Graham Walker, professor of political history at Queen’s University Belfast, says abortion has always brought together fundamentalist Protestants and right-wing Catholics in Northern Ireland.
“When I first came to Belfast in the early 1980s, Ian Paisley was joining nuns in the picket outside the Brook [sexual-health] clinic in the city centre. It was a very tense time during the Troubles, but here you had Roman Catholics lining up with Paisley in an alliance of convenience. So it’s nothing new.”
Yet social attitudes have changed significantly, he says.
“The recent debate over gay marriage in Northern Ireland is the best evidence for that. Even though the Stormont assembly rejected a proposal that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, no one could have predicted just how close the vote would be [almost 50 per cent of elected members declared their support for the motion]. That would never have happened in the past.”
But the DUP tabled a petition of concern, to ensure the motion would have to command a cross-community majority to succeed, and only three of the 45 assembly members who voted in favour of gay marriage were unionists.
Does that suggest the wider unionist community is likely to take a tougher, more traditionalist line on such issues?
Not necessarily, says Walker.
“There is a strong liberal constituency within unionism. Famously, they don’t come out to vote, or they may prefer to vote for more liberal politicians but end up going back into the tribal fold, perhaps to make sure that a Sinn Féin representative does not become First Minister, or other reasons like that. But they are out there.”
Genevieve Redmond (not her real name), who chairs a school board of governors, may be one of the people Walker is talking about.
“I wouldn’t want to see abortion on demand, women using it like contraception, and being as promiscuous as they like,” she says. “That would be a retrograde step. We have to uphold certain moral standards. I do think that abortion is necessary in certain extreme situations, though. You are killing a baby, but that may be best for the mother, and possibly the baby, too, if it’s going to be born into some terrible situation.”
Michelle Markham, the retired head-teacher of St Joseph’s College, a Catholic secondary school in Belfast, says the Marie Stopes centre and its supporters are seeking to challenge the status quo in Northern Ireland.
“I’m happy to say that I don’t believe in abortion: I believe in the sanctity of life; I believe that life begins at the point of conception. But I won’t damn a person for whom it’s her choice. I don’t believe in harassing people. I know women who have had abortions, and it has not altered my respect for them. But I don’t think any of those women rejoiced in the fact they had to do that. There’s tangible regret.”
Markham says if someone came to her and said she wanted abortion, she would not turn her away. “I wouldn’t say, ‘That’s a sin,’ I would encourage her to seek professional advice and counselling. I’m in the same dilemma as lots of people in Northern Ireland. It seems to me, from what I’ve observed of politicians on all sides, that we’re just not ready for this yet.”
Northern Ireland is becoming a more secular society, with surveys of church attendance showing decades of decline.
A 2010 report by Bernadette Hayes and Lizanne Dowds, for the Economic and Social Research Council, found while two-thirds of the adult population attended church at least weekly in the late 1960s, by the late 1990s this had fallen to two-fifths, and by 2008 only a third of the population reported attending church every week.
The fall-off has been most dramatic among Catholics, with a 55 per cent decline in attendance between 1968 and 2008.
Although religion may be weakening as a public institution, with nominal adherence now the norm, Hayes and Dowds say it retains a real presence in people’s private beliefs.
The vast majority of people continue to claim a religious affiliation, and a significant majority continue to hold to the main tenets of the Christian faith. Perhaps this “privatisation” of religion – a looser, more individual version of the strictures of the mainstream faith – might account for changes in attitudes to abortion and other complex social issues.
For instance, a 2012 survey on behalf of the Family Planning Association found only one in five people in Northern Ireland (or 18 per cent) believed a rape victim should not be allowed an abortion.
There was also evidence of growing support from Stormont assembly members, with an anonymous survey showing 66 per cent of respondents backing the right to abort in those circumstances. This was a rise from 34 per cent of MLAs three years ago.
Stephen Douds, a writer and freelance television producer who lives in Belfast, says he was struck by the full-page adverts taken out in local newspapers by anti-abortion campaigners, in response to the opening of the clinic.
“It was the old-fashioned religious language: the talk of prayer for the unborn, fasting, 54-day rosary novenas. It spoke of a time and a place that I thought was gone for good. I detect no fight within the Catholic church on this, little appetite from clerical leaders for on-street protests. The secularisation of the North and collapse in church attendance has led to many Catholics adopting a laissez-faire, live-and-let-live attitude to social issues. Pro-life is a minority movement within Northern Catholicism.”
For those involved with the Marie Stopes clinic, there are high hopes public attitudes are shifting. Prof Bill Rolston, a sociologist at the University of Ulster and a member of the centre’s newly formed advisory board, says he has been encouraged by the numbers of young women willing to admit publicly that in certain circumstances they might choose an abortion.
“That’s been a very sudden change. The opening of the clinic could be like the X case in Dublin: it could bring the debate to another level.”
But the veteran commentator Chris Ryder says he despairs of the closed minds in Northern Ireland.
“We’re seeing a lot of sinister and fanatical biblically based lobbying going on in the background: issues like the promotion of creationism, opposition to gay marriage, the anti-trafficking proposals that are dressed up to look like compassion but are based on the condemnation of prostitution. As for the issue of abortion, it’s the same as in the Republic: no one will face up to it.”
Northern Ireland still has a long way to go, he says.
“The truth is that we are a society groping its way towards the modern era, in the absence of honest political leadership and considered debate.”