Fintan O'Toole: Coveney would take us back to era of lying women

It’s time to talk about lying women. About brazen bare-faced female mendacity – and why some people want more of it.

In the history of feminine deceit in Ireland there is a special place for the cycle regulator. Younger readers unfamiliar with the phrase may well ask, like the guard in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, "Is it about a bicycle?" It is not about a bicycle but it is another masterpiece of blackly comic Irish fiction. The contraceptive pill was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Ireland, however banned the importation of contraceptives. But there was an Irish solution to this Irish problem: if women told their doctors that they had problems with irregular menstrual cycles, the pill could be prescribed as a regulator. Contraception would be a mere (and of course utterly unintentional and highly regrettable) side effect. From 1963 onwards, the pill was imported into Ireland to keep menstrual anarchy at bay.

This involved lying on a heroic scale. Everybody knew that women were using the pill as a contraceptive. On April 9th 1970, for example, the legal affairs correspondent of The Irish Times wrote that "the pill is not described as a contraceptive in presentation by manufacturers for import to Ireland. It is imported under the title of 'Cycle regulator'. It is supposedly being used for 'medical purposes' other than contraception. But it can safely be said that the vast majority of women using the pill do so for contraception and that this is their doctor's intention."

The practice of this deceit was a national sport, rivalling camogie as the distinctively Irish game for women

And this wasn't just the lying Jezebels of Dublin 4. The practice of this deceit was a national sport, rivalling camogie as the distinctively Irish game for women. In a letter to The Irish Times of March 2nd 1972 the Westmeath and Longford county obstetrician Michael Twomey wrote that he and his colleagues were prescribing the pill as a cycle regulator "in large quantities", knowing full well that this was a lie: "We are not allowed to be honest and give it its correct description." In 1973, 38,000 women were being prescribed "cycle regulators" every month. By 1978, this had risen to 48,000.

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Unique in the world

It turned out that Irish women were unique in the world in their inability to put some discipline on their periods without chemical help. The leading obstetrician Prof John Bonner (later a key architect of the Eighth Amendment), noted that "Ireland would [appear to] have the highest incidence of irregular cycles in women in the history of the human race". And of course the Catholic Church was fully on board with the duplicity – Catholic schools and hospitals would have ceased to function if teachers and nurses were not having awful trouble with their periods.

But just because everybody knew the lie for what it was, this did not mean that the  sham did not have to be maintained. An importer who described the contraceptive pill as a contraceptive pill would have the cargo seized by Customs.

A doctor who prescribed it as a contraceptive was breaking the law. And many pharmacists policed the fiction. At the Irish Pharmaceutical Union congress in October 1976 Noel McManus, a Dublin pharmacist, explained that he was completely opposed to artificial contraceptives but sold the pill because "You never know if it is being prescribed therapeutically as a cycle regulator or for contraceptive purposes. In cases where I thought it was [the latter] I have come out from behind the counter and said 'if this is for that purpose I will not give it to you'."

I think Irish women are sick of being invited to lie about their sexuality, their fertility and the choices they make

Behind the absurd comedy, there were consequences for women. The high dose oestrogen pill was not suitable for some women but they used it because it was the only form of contraception they could get. Reporting on the Irish Medical Association conference in 1978, The Irish Times noted a speech by Dr Mary Henry: "because of this hypocrisy women had suffered: too many unsuitable women were put on the pill in the past and were still on it today and Dr Henry saw them when they developed clots in the deep veins of their legs as a result."

But no matter – in the deep veins of Irish culture there is a love of, and a talent for, evasion. And though he surely doesn’t mean it to be, Simon Coveney’s solution to the Irish abortion problem is in this tradition. Instead of allowing women to get the abortion pill on request up to 12 weeks into their pregnancy, he would prefer us to have a limited regime in which rape is one of the very few grounds for access to abortion.

Just say you’ve been raped

Since rape cannot possibly be proven within that time frame, he envisages a situation in which a woman can go her GP, say she has been raped, and get the pills. It is the cycle regulator all over again, but much more grotesque: just say you’ve been raped, and we can all just pretend.

I think Irish women are sick of being invited to lie about their sexuality, their fertility and the choices they make in their lives. The decades since 1983 have been a very irregular period of hypocrisies, evasions, silences. The cycle must end with honesty.