Celebrities lecture Ireland in favor of repealing abortion ban

On Friday, the Republic of Ireland will vote on a referendum that, if passed, would repeal the country’s 35-year-old strict abortion ban. A slew of celebrities have come out in support of the repeal including U2, Liam Neeson, Boy George, Caitriona Balfe (the Irish star of the STARZ series “Outlander”) Hozier, and more.

Despite star support, conservatives worldwide including myself and others here in the U.S. hope the repeal fails. The Mirror reported while the “Repeal the 8th” crowd holds a majority, the gap is narrowing, 45 percent to 34 percent, with 18 percent still largely undecided. Pro-life advocates are hoping Ireland votes no to repeal the 8th, which would signal an unusual cultural shift in Europe. The repeal should fail; the ban has made Ireland a poster-child for counter-arguing many pro-choice talking points.

A little history: In 1983, 67 percent of Ireland’s voters endorsed a constitutional amendment that, in effect, banned abortion entirely, while acknowledging the mother’s equal right to life. When that ban was constituted, abortion had already been illegal in Ireland for more than 100 years. In 2013, The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act allowed abortion in specific, limited circumstances – such as when the life of the mother was at risk. Leo Varadkar, the prime minister and leader of the center-right Fine Gael party, now wants to repeal this decades-old amendment entirely, and he is also campaigning for abortion to be legal up to the 12th week of pregnancy. If the repeal passes, the legislature will vote on whether abortion will be legal up to the first trimester sometime in the near future.

Advocates of repealing the 8th say it’s time for Irish women to have access to abortion like so many other countries, not just because of the importance of “women’s choice” (the go-to argument in the U.S.) but because of safety. Because nothing says safety for a baby like aborting it, amirite? (I guess “Black Irish” humor only works at a pub in Dublin.)

Still, what the pro-choice Irish mean is that a mother’s life is always at risk, of course, if she’s not allowed to have a baby. First, the 2013 Act allowed for that provision. Second, one of the most compelling stories the “Repeal the 8th” crowd uses to garner support is that of Savita Halappanavar. In 2012, Halappanavar was 17 weeks pregnant when she became ill with sepsis and died. However, Halappanavar died of the failure to manage sepsis, not something like preeclampsia, which is directly related to pregnancy and can cause death.

Pro-choice Irish claim that abortion is medically necessary but in fact it’s the lack of abortion, or the ban on it, that has encouraged Ireland to become a world leader in medical care. Since abortion is not allowed “on demand” in Ireland, according to the Maternal Death Enquiry, Ireland is one of the safest countries in the world to have a baby. The maternal death rate is extremely low compared with the U.K. and the U.S. Strange how when babies are viewed as people, suddenly it becomes safer to birth them?

Pro-choice advocates in Ireland have been pushing the repeal of this ban for months because they believe women deserve a right to choose. Yet Simon Harris, the Minister of Health, hasn’t really provided a choice, articulating very little about what abortion entails – almost like he may in fact be hiding the very ghoulish nature of the procedure, which ends the life of tiny babies and which, as a new study shows, “is tied to a sharp decline in women’s mental health.”

While Harris has engaged in some committee debates about abortion among his political peers, he’s done very little, if any, public debates about the topic. For a party that lauds choice, Harris and Fine Gael have fiercely guarded any information on the topic, let alone any facts that might sway women away from voting on the ban. Even though the pro-life crowd, specifically “Love Both,” has called out Simon Harris, encouraging him to debate abortion with them in a public setting, he has repeatedly declined. So much for “choice” in an age of information.

When Harris has advocated for the repeal of the abortion ban publicly, he has bemoaned the number of women who’ve had to travel outside Ireland to get one. Yet even that’s not as many as one might think. According to the U.K. Department of Health, between January 1980 and December 2016, only about 170,216 women and girls traveled from the Republic of Ireland to access abortion services in another country. (Keep in mind the population of Ireland is currently nearly 5 million.) About that many people attended U2’s record-breaking concert at the Rose Bowl 10 years ago, so it’s not all that compelling. While this fact is supposed to garner sympathy for Irish women, instead it makes me think of all the hundreds of thousands of babies enjoying life as Sean, Julia, Gareth, Ann, and Brenda because they weren’t aborted.

“Repeal the 8th” advocates have plastered their messaging in bright pink hearts all around the country, but nothing would break the hearts of the women of Ireland more than to open the floodgates of abortion, extinguishing the lives of potential Irish citizens and causing emotional and psychological damage to the women who go through with it.

This is Ireland’s moment to prove that a ban on abortion isn’t backward at all but progressive, life-saving, medically advanced, and morally superior. You can’t fault the pro-choice movement for trying to repeal the ban, but I hope it fails – and along with it, all of their weak talking points. As the Irish say, “Níl saoi gan locht,” there’s not a wise man without fault (We have all got our weaknesses.)

Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.