On May 25, Ireland voted to repeal the country’s Eighth Amendment, the law banning most abortions. Turnout was an extraordinary 64 percent, and the vote to repeal won by a decisive margin—66.4 percent to 33.6 percent. The Irish Parliament is expected to act on the referendum by repealing the law in the next two or three months. When that happens, Irish women will no longer have to seek abortions in Britain, as more than 3,000 do each year, and will not have to smuggle in contraband abortifacients.
The Eighth Amendment, passed in 1983 to ban virtually all abortions except those intended to save the life of the mother, was frequently called “restrictive” and “cruel.” But that view is premised exclusively on the modern doctrine of extreme personal autonomy. It fails to consider those the law protected: unborn persons chosen for termination simply because they had fetal defects, were the wrong sex, or came at the wrong time.
The pro-repeal side framed the debate as if it were only about a woman’s right to end her own pregnancy. But the repeal of the Eighth Amendment will grant other, less wholesome, “rights,” too—the right of an abortionist to earn a sizeable fee for evacuating an expectant mother’s uterus; the right of pharmaceutical companies to profit from abortifacients on Irish soil; and the right of men to pressure lovers to abort their pregnancies without the inconvenience of crossing the Irish Sea.
Most European media, together with the pro-repeal movement, portrayed the referendum’s outcome as a step forward from superstition and backwardness to enlightenment and tolerance. May 25 will be remembered, Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar confidently predicted on Sunday, as “the day Ireland stepped out from under the last of our shadows and into the light, the day we came of age as a country.” But of course the problem of unwanted offspring is not unique to our enlightened age. The ancients lacked our safe medical procedures and clinical rhetoric, but they had the same anxieties. They simply dealt with the problem in a more straightforward and less euphemized way, namely by leaving unwelcome newborns to die of exposure to the elements.
Has Ireland stepped into the light—or followed Europe and North America back into the shadows? The answer is perhaps a matter of conviction, but we will not soon forget the sight of educated Europeans dancing in the streets of Dublin to celebrate the designation of an entire class of persons as extinguishable.
