Since I’m not an Irish resident I had no vote in Ireland’s 2018 Abortion Referendum but I was in Dublin when the vote to overturn their abortion ban came in, and I rejoiced at the nation’s long overdue decision following far too many years of Irish women and girls being forced to continue with pregnancies they didn’t want or travel to England for abortions. Along with thousands of others, on Saturday May 26th, 2018, I travelled into the Dublin Castle grounds to mark the historic day.
Speaking from Dublin Castle on May 26th, 2018, Tánaiste, and then taoiseach, Leo Varadkar said it was “a day when we say no more”: “No more to doctors telling their patients that there’s no more can be done for them in their own country, no more lonely journeys across the Irish Sea, no more stigma as the veil of secrecy is lifted and no more isolation as the burden of shame is gone.”
Even on that day, standing among a gathered Irish crowd, I experienced a surreal feeling of both relieve and creeping dread that as a victory for Irish women’s bodily autonomy rights was won those same rights were being chipped away in the United States of America. And here we are, four years later, a leaked draft opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the top court’s precedent-setting Roe v Wade ruling.
We must be prepared, everywhere, to continue to fight for a woman's right to choose, again and again and again.
* Read a history of the Eighth Amendment from 1983 to 2018.
* Read my Blog for Choice entry from 2008.
Photos from Dublin, May, 2018
