Two years after the UK’s remainer liberals lost the EU referendum, Irish campaigners fighting to repeal the constitution’s eighth amendment forbidding abortion showed them how you win this kind of vote: with real passion, real vision and real determination not to take anything for granted. In 2018, Ireland’s pro-choice voters won the referendum handsomely – 66% on a 64% turnout – an inspiring story told in this spirited documentary by Aideen Kane, Lucy Kennedy and Maeve O’Boyle.
So many of Ireland’s women, particularly its young women, were infuriated by the years of being told that their experiences, their health and their safety were quite irrelevant compared with those scruples declaimed by thin-lipped reactionaries of church and state. What galvanised the campaign was the horrific story of Savita Halappanavar, the Indian woman who in 2012 died in University Hospital Galway after a septic miscarriage because a termination was not permitted; the pure shame of that event energised the movement.
The abortion issue is unique, in secular political terms, for the absolute impossibility of dialogue between the two sides, and in fact the pro-choice activists in this film conform to their side’s traditional unwillingness to spell out their baseline beliefs: the foetus does not become fully eligible for human rights until it is a separate entity and has left the mother’s body. Anti-abortionists believe, on the contrary, that this happens on conception, in the womb. It is a fundamentalist belief that in Ireland has traditionally won the day.
But pro-choice women were sick of being lectured and sorrowingly told they were the useful idiots of evil – particularly as this political stance came as part and parcel of a general contempt for women’s rights, of which the Magdalene laundries scandal was another grisly part.
Pro-choice activists won with a campaign that declined to go negative, and, indeed, may have benefited from the attraction of its exuberant “Yes” motif. Now they face decades of vigilance to defend their gains.
The 8th is released on 25 May in cinemas and on digital platforms.
