Seána Glennon, Postdoctoral Fellow, Constitutional Law, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Donald Trump has flip-flopped on the issue of abortion for decades, from declaring himself “very pro-choice” in the 1990s and “pro-life” in 2011 to hinting this year that he’d support a national abortion ban.
Abortion is a topic of huge importance in American politics this year: it could decide the United States presidential election, and the way states regulate abortion access will have life-or-death consequences for women.
Read more: Will abortion be the issue that swings the 2024 US presidential election?
Apart from Trump’s preposterous claim that Democrats support the execution of babies after birth — infanticide, in other words, which is illegal in all 50 American states — Trump did concede during the recent presidential debate that he supports abortion access for certain reasons: pregnancy arising from rape or incest, and to save “the life of the mother.”
American legislators should look to Ireland to understand the real-life consequences of a ban on abortion, the chilling effect on health-care professionals of an exception only in cases of a threat to the life of the pregnant woman, and the significant problems with attempting to legislate abortion access only for certain reasons, like rape and incest.
Read more: Ireland's abortion referendum – here's what you need to know
Tragic repercussions
In the early 1980s, the Irish people voted by referendum to insert a provision into the country’s constitution, known as the Eighth Amendment. In explicitly inserting, for the first time, constitutional protection for a right to life of the unborn — stated to be equal to that of the right to life of the mother — the amendment operated as a near-blanket ban on abortion for more than three decades.
This constitutional ban did not prevent abortion from taking place in Ireland: it simply drove women who could afford it to other countries to access abortion services.
Others ordered abortion medications on the internet and took them alone, without medical supervision. An unknown number of vulnerable women were forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.
The ban also impacted women with much-wanted pregnancies. The Savita Halappanavar case concerned a young woman who was happy to be pregnant with her first baby. But she began experiencing an inevitable miscarriage and ultimately died in hospital after her medical team hesitated to intervene while a fetal heartbeat was still being detected.
Halappanavar’s death led to an outcry for action to lift the constitutional ban on abortion and ensure that all pregnant women could have access to appropriate medical care.
Another tragic Irish case involved a pregnant woman who was looking forward to welcoming her third child but sadly suffered brain-stem death during her pregnancy. She was subjected to extraordinary life support measures in an effort to save her fetus, even as her body had already begun to decompose.
The woman’s family had to launch legal action against the Irish health service to secure an order for the withdrawal of treatment to allow their daughter to die with a measure of dignity. The court heard how medical staff felt compelled to keep the dead woman on life support, for legal reasons, as the fetus still had a heartbeat.
Making health care dangerous
In the run-up to Ireland’s 2018 abortion referendum, the public debate and opinion polls were focused on the possibilities of providing access to abortion for certain reasons, such as those identified by Trump at the debate: when the pregnancy is posing a risk to health, or the pregnancy arose from rape or incest.
The citizens’ assembly established by the Irish government to review the abortion issue in 2016 did a comprehensive examination into the provision of abortion services. It shone a light on the substantial problems of specifying reasons and developing processes for pregnant women to establish their eligibility for an abortion.
Read more: What Canada can learn from Ireland on citizen engagement to bolster democracy
Statistics tell us that most sexual assaults go unreported; prosecutions often result in acquittals; and prosecuting a sexual offence can take years. So how can a pregnant woman prove her rape to access a legal abortion, and from a humanitarian perspective, why should she be required to?
Imposing conditions around the prescription of abortion pills and the ability of doctors to carry out certain procedures also impacts women who are miscarrying and whose lives and health may be put in grave danger by a pregnancy that is ending but will not pass naturally.
Anti-abortion measures cost lives
Politicizing the issue of abortion, instituting bans, carving out abortion from the wider reproductive experience, limiting access to abortion medication and surgeries for certain reasons that must be policed and adjudicated: Ireland’s experiences have shown that none of these actions makes health care safer for pregnant patients. Nor do they provide sensible guidance for their doctors.
In fact, anti-abortion measures make pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion and the entire spectrum of reproductive health care exponentially more dangerous, more stigmatized and much lonelier. These actions, instituted for political reasons and not for better patient care, cost lives.
Many Canadians tuning into the Trump/Harris debate — or listening to various U.S. politics over the past eight years — may feel relief that abortion is not a top political issue here and does not seem to have caused the same level of polarization.
But with a federal election looming, there’s little stopping the issue from becoming a political football in the years ahead.
It’s estimated that one in three women in Canada will have an abortion in their lifetime, so now is the time to learn lessons from other countries, especially the U.S. and Ireland, on what not to do.
Seána Glennon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
