Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 11, 1995 TAG: 9503140045
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SHAWN POGATCHNIK ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: DUBLIN, IRELAND LENGTH: Medium
- When women in this staunchly Roman Catholic nation wanted an abortion, they were forced to sneak across the Irish Sea to England.
Irish laws forbade doctors or clinics from doing abortions or offering the women information on obtaining abortions. Authorities once were even able to prevent women from leaving the country if their intentions were known.
On Friday, lawmakers in the Dail, the 166-seat parliament, approved the first loophole in Ireland's blanket ban on abortion. Their ``information'' bill allows doctors to provide names and addresses of English family-planning clinics to pregnant clients.
Women still must cross the Irish Sea, but they now can travel with a legally obtained address in hand.
``It's just so hypocritical,'' said Deirdre Smith, a Dublin news vendor. ``We can't face the reality of abortion, so we export it to England.''
Smith was hawking copies of the Evening Standard, which carried an ``ABORTION BILL PASSED'' headline.
Ironically, that competed with the Evening Press' ``WOMAN QUIZZED ON DEAD BABY'' which dealt with suspicions that a teenager killed an unwanted child, a crime that has in the past been committed by Irish women who had been denied abortions.
The Roman Catholic church hierarchy bitterly fought the bill, which is the first crack in Ireland's centuries-old anti-abortion legislation. More than 90 percent of Ireland's 3.5 million people identify themselves as Catholics.
The bill - facing expected approval next week by the largely symbolic upper tiers of government, the Senate and President Mary Robinson - marks a sea change in attitudes towards the estimated 4,500 women who travel overseas for abortions each year.
It also caps three years of acrimonious debate that ignited when a High Court judge barred a 14-year-old girl who had been raped by a family friend from traveling overseas for an abortion.
That case produced an international furor, and forced a complex public referendum in November 1992. Voters elected to amend the constitution's anti-abortion clause to allow women the right to seek information on overseas abortion services and to travel there.
Travel since then has been legal, but allowing information required legislation. It's taken 27 months to turn the public's wish into a palatable compromise.
The bill requires doctors to counsel pregnant women on all other options, including keeping the child and adoption; bars doctors from phoning or writing to English clinics themselves; and gives individual doctors ``conscientious objector'' rights to refuse to offer abortion-clinic information.
It also places restrictions on ads for English clinics in public places. Pro-choice campaigners who spread contact numbers via leaflets in public places will face fines of up to $2,300.
Other realities face women too poor, isolated or uninformed to reach England.
Irish newspapers noted Friday the case of a 19-year-old woman found in a state of hysteria Thursday in Ballyroe, a village west of Dublin. Nearby, police found a newborn baby lying dead in a water-filled bucket.
Ireland's national police called the death suspicious but refused to say whether the unidentified woman would be charged with any crime.
The Evening Press said five newborns have been found dead already this year in Ireland, left in canals, along the banks of rivers or wrapped in plastic in Dublin's Phoenix Park.
``The fact that this still happens today shows up the dark side of Irish life - that pregnancy can be hidden and denied in this way,'' said Frances Fitzgerald, a Labor Party lawmaker.
by CNB