In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment involving a cat, a sealed box and a radioactive substance. In the popularised version, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive until an observer opens the box and establishes the fate of the unfortunate feline.
De Valera brought Schrödinger to Dublin in 1939, which may account for why we have our own version, which might be termed Schrödinger’s facts – that is, facts that can be both visible and invisible at the same time.
Take the 2023 abortion figures, which show that at least 10,033 abortions took place, another big increase since 2022, when 8,156 were recorded. The 2023 figures are roughly equivalent to the entire population in 2022 of Dungarvan, Co Waterford, or of Ratoath, Co Meath.
No one could suggest that the abortion figures since the legalisation of abortion are invisible. The Government compiles them (in a minimalist fashion) and releases them annually. No one could seriously suggest that the abortion figures are truly visible, either. They are, by a quiet consensus, ignored. The equivalent of an Irish town’s population can be aborted without any perceived need for discussion.
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We were told repeatedly during the campaign that the figures would not rise. It was one of the key factors to persuade middle-ground voters.
In 2017, 3,019 women from the Republic had an abortion in England and Wales, less than half the 6,673 who had abortions there in 2001. Thirty-four women also had abortions in the Netherlands. In 2018 the then minister for health, Simon Harris, said three women a day were using then illegal abortion medication, roughly another 1,095. Fifteen abortions took place under the 2013 legislation, including five emergency operations to save a mother’s life, which had always been legal. That’s about 5,000 abortions, give or take. The number of abortions has doubled since then: 6,666 in the first year and now, 10,033.
Simon Coveney, who recently announced his resignation from politics, was central to persuading voters who were against abortion in all except very difficult cases to vote Yes.
Initially anti-abortion, Coveney explained that he changed his mind because a “clinical protocol” of “informed consent” would be followed, which “would require a doctor to lay out all information and options in an impartial way to a woman who requests an abortion”. That never happened.
He added that a “pause period” should be mandatory. That three-day waiting period is now severely under threat.
Finally, he said he believed that “a woman who proceeds with an abortion after receiving the support and information through a protocol such as I’ve described is very likely to have travelled to the UK or accessed a pill online in the absence of such a system being available in Ireland.”
In other words, all repeal will do is stop exporting our abortion problem, another favoured campaign slogan. Schrödinger’s facts mean that no one with influence or power will ever have to explain why figures have doubled or why they are reneging on the promise not to expand the grounds even further.
As Coveney leaves politics, who will ask him about being instrumental in passing a referendum that led to an astonishing rise in abortions?
In Ireland, you don’t have to inquire whether women are voluntarily choosing abortion, or feel driven to it by the cost of living crisis and lack of housing
Coveney is widely respected for his role in navigating the fallout from Brexit when tánaiste and minister for foreign affairs. It is instructive to compare the way the claims made in that polarising and divisive referendum campaign continue to be debated.
The losing side in Brexit is not being told that they need to accept that the people have spoken. Nor are they being told that, to quote former TD Kate O’Connell from 2018, who has reappeared on the political scene since Leo Varadkar’s retirement as taoiseach. “We won. We’ll get our way ... Ye can talk for as long as ye like ... Ye lost. It must be hurting.”
For example, after the Conservative Party’s recent well-deserved drubbing, Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s former director of communications, suggested that “What we’ve discovered is: you can’t tell people Brexit will slash migration and see it double ... and still expect the public to listen.”
In Ireland, the realm of Schrödinger’s facts, you can tell people abortion figures won’t rise and still be unaccountable when they double.
You don’t have to inquire whether women are voluntarily choosing abortion, or feel driven to it by the cost of living crisis and lack of housing. You can safely assume that you will not be asked any awkward questions unless it is about when you plan to expand access to abortion.
It is rarely mentioned that Schrödinger was a serial predator and one of his victims had a disastrous abortion that left her unable to have children. Another little-known fact is that Schrödinger devised his thought experiment as a reductio ad absurdum to challenge the theory held by physicists such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg that a particle does not have a defined position until measured.
Describing a simultaneously dead and alive cat was supposed to show that the theory lacked something. Be that as it may, it could not possibly lack as much as Irish Schrödinger’s facts do – scrutiny, discussion and accountability.