Voters Defeat Ireland Abortion
Bill
By
SHAWN POGATCHNIK, AP from AOL News, March 7, 2002
DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - By a
razor-thin margin, voters rejected a government plan to amend Ireland's tough
abortion laws, official returns showed Thursday - a victory for those pushing
for greater abortion rights.
The result from Wednesday's referendum left in
legal limbo a decade-old Supreme Court judgment that sought to legalize
abortions for women whose pregnancies threatened their lives, including from
suicide.
The defeated amendment would have overturned this
landmark 1992 ruling, which created the first exception to Ireland's
constitutional ban on abortion, the toughest such law in Europe.
The vote was a defeat for the Roman Catholic
Church. Catholic bishops, who each had issued letters calling for churchgoers to
vote "yes," made no comment on the result.
Jubilant "no" campaigners said the amendment's
rejection - by 10,556 votes out of more than 1.2 million cast - meant that the
next Irish government would be obliged to pass legislation allowing pregnant,
suicidal women to receive abortions in Ireland.
"The electorate has rejected, although by a small
margin, efforts to roll back the Supreme Court judgment. They clearly want the
court's judgment enacted fully into law and this we will do," said Michael
Noonan, leader of the main opposition Fine Gael party, which hopes to take power
in a general election this summer.
Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said his amendment had
been "an honest and genuine attempt" to resolve the constitution's abortion ban
with the Supreme Court ruling.
He vowed to press ahead with plans to form a Crisis
Pregnancy Agency, which would aim to counsel many of the approximately 7,000
Irish women who travel to England each year for abortions.
"We need to recognize and address the pressures
which impel women towards seeking abortion. It is a significant challenge,"
Ahern said.
The outcome reflected a profound divide in
attitudes between rural and urban Ireland, particularly between the increasingly
outward-looking capital and the rest of the country.
All 10 Dublin constituencies had strong "no"
majorities, including Ahern's central Dublin district, where three-fifths of
voters rejected his plans. But elsewhere, most constituencies had solid "yes"
majorities, led by the northwest county of Donegal, which habitually records the
strongest vote on traditional morality issues.
Political analysts said Ahern's referendum probably
was lost because of a split within the ranks of Ireland's many anti-abortion
groups.
The biggest group, the Pro-Life Campaign led by
William Binchy, was promoting a "yes" vote. But several others led by former
Christian singer Dana Rosemary Scallon urged rejection on grounds that the
amendment wouldn't outlaw use of new contraceptives, chiefly the morning-after
pill, or use of fetal tissue in medical research.
"This is a victory for the unborn," said Scallon,
Ireland's most conservative representative in European Parliament.
And Binchy said lawmakers shouldn't interpret the
outcome as an endorsement of the Supreme Court's views on abortion law.
"The truth of the matter is the Supreme Court
decision provides for abortion up to birth," said Binchy, an expert in Irish
constitutional law. "That is a prospect that most people in this country do not
want. Certainly all those who voted yes do not want that, and quite a
substantial majority in the no camp do not want that either."
The 1992 court ruling involved the case of a
14-year-old Dublin girl, identified only as X, who had been raped and
impregnated by a family friend. The girl's parents had asked police to gather
forensic evidence before she went to England for an abortion. Instead, the
attorney general barred the girl from traveling, saying this would violate the
constitutional ban.
The court, which heard psychiatric evidence that
the girl would commit suicide if refused an abortion, ruled that the
constitution's "right to life" section conferred equal rights to a pregnant
woman, therefore any pregnancy that threatened to end a woman's life - including
from suicide - could be legally terminated in Ireland.
Although the X case verdict allowed gynecologists
the authority to perform abortions in Ireland in such circumstances, not a
single abortion has been carried out on a suicidal woman in the decade since.
Doctors say they fear being sued by anti-abortion activists as long as lawmakers
refuse to pass supporting legislation.
In 1992, voters did amend the constitution to
legalize women's right to get information about English abortion services and to
travel there. They rejected a third measure that, like the proposal rejected
Wednesday, would have barred the threat of suicide as a valid reason for
abortion.
Senior members of Ahern's government predicted
that, if they are returned to power, they would be slow to reopen the abortion
debate.
"The status quo
will prevail for some time," said Health Minister Micheal Martin.
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