No sooner had repeal been won when the cry went up “the North is next!” There were calls for a second referendum on the other side of the Border, with the hope of a similarly historic result. But while it is exhilarating to feel the spray from that tremendous sea-swell of change, Northern Ireland’s cruel, archaic abortion laws require a different solution.
A referendum is not the means to liberate the women of the North because abortion is not a constitutional issue there, and any vote for reform – although likely to be a hearty Yes – would not be legally-binding even if the currently defunct Stormont assembly were to return at some point in the future.
There were high hopes that Westminster would seize the moment – and the momentum – generated by the result in the Republic, and step in to legislate for abortion rights in Northern Ireland. This is the only clear way that women will get the services that they so desperately need, currently denied to them under the potential threat of life imprisonment, which is amongst the harshest criminal penalties in Europe.
Earlier this year a UN committee ruled that the UK was systematically violating the rights of women living in the North by restricting their access to termination, thus exposing them to “horrific situations” that may amount to “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.
Serious pressure has been placed on British prime minister Theresa May, from both inside and outside her party, to take legislative action, and finally right this most egregious wrong. Of course, it was a big problem for May because the DUP, on whom she depends for her Commons majority, takes a vehemently anti-abortion stance.
Put first
So as a self-declared feminist, which was she prepared to put first: the undignified, hucksterish deal with the DUP which allows her to cling to power or the violated human rights of the women of Northern Ireland?
Well, we have our answer. It isn’t a surprise: May has chosen power and abandoned us. Yesterday her spokesman ruled out any unilateral move and said it was a devolved matter on which politicians at Westminster should not legislate.
And the real kick in the teeth is that she even tried to represent her craven move as a gift of democratic accountability. The prime minister’s spokesman said it was “important to recognise that the people of Northern Ireland are entitled to their own process run by locally-elected politicians”.
What process? What politicians?
To leave this vital matter to a non-existent Stormont is to leave women to their grim fate.
Even while Stormont was sitting, politicians repeatedly abdicated their duty to amend the Victorian law which governs abortion, with evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics traditionally finding common ground in their opposition to reform.
The cross-party “pro-life” group at Stormont symbolised that pious rapprochement: a prayerful, all-male band of politicians discovering a shared interest, across the sectarian divide, in policing the contents of women’s wombs.
Dark warnings
Meanwhile, Westminster has consistently capitulated to dark warnings about constitutional crises and the potential collapse of power-sharing any time it looked likely that the Commons might overturn the North’s abortion ban.
Women’s rights to agency over their own lives have always lost out to the implicit threat that the highly-strung people of Ulster might go back to killing each other.
Women’s bodies have been sacrificed, over and over, to protect the precarious peace accommodation. To what end? Stormont collapsed anyway, because of an entirely unrelated matter, yet the ban has continued.
Speaking ahead of the British government’s decision to yet again wash its hands of the matter, DUP MP for North Antrim Ian Paisley declared that “the settled will of the people [of Northern Ireland] has been to afford protections to the unborn life and protect the life of the mother”.
Perhaps that was once the case, but it is true no longer - even among DUP stalwarts. According to analysis by ARK, Northern Ireland’s social policy information platform, the public is in favour of reform of abortion law.
In the 2016 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, 63 per cent – which, as ARK notes, is exactly the same proportion as in the Republic – think that “it is a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion”.
DUP supporters
ARK’s analysis also showed that DUP supporters believe abortion should definitely or probably be legal in six out of seven possible scenarios, which actually shows a higher level of support for reform of abortion law than Sinn Féin or SDLP voters.
May’s government is guilty of a gross abdication of responsibility. Human rights are not a devolved matter, and she could act to remedy the impossible situation in Northern Ireland if she chose to do so. Instead she passed it on to the phantom parliament at Stormont.
When so many of us said Yes to the Belfast Agreement 20 years ago we didn’t realise that we were voting to keep the women in jail.