The Sacred “Right to Life.”

We now know that between 1925 and 1961, almost 800 children died in Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway. They were buried in an unmarked plot. No burial records were kept for individual children, and we would not have known of the mass grave but for local historian Catherine Corless’ painstaking research and her determination that the deaths be acknowledged.  80 percent of babies born at Bon Secours did not make it to their first birthday. Those who managed to survive longer were raised almost as slaves and as Ireland Taoiseach (prime minister) Enda Kenny recently recognized, were treated as “... an inferior sub-species.”

The Bon Secours “mother and baby home” was more accurately a penal workhouse—one of 10 run by religious orders in Ireland. From 1922 to 1996, they incarcerated approximately 35,000 unmarried women. Those who gave birth before entering or while there had their babies forcibly removed from them.

Conditions in these so-called homes were horrific. A report from the United Nations Committee Against Torture in February noted that “girls placed in these institutions were forced to work in slavery-like conditions and were often subject to inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment as well as to physical and sexual abuse.” The U.N. account adds that “girls were deprived of their identity, of education and often of food and essential medicines and were imposed with an obligation of silence and prohibited from having any contact with the outside world.”

Two years ago, 31-year-old dentist Savita Halappanavar died “in agony” at a Galway hospital because staff were barred from conducting the abortion that would have saved her life during a catastrophic miscarriage. Indeed, the attending midwife told Halappanavar that an abortion could not be carried out because Ireland is a “Catholic country.”

Halappanavar’s death led to international outrage, but abortion remains a criminal offense in Ireland, north and south. Under the law, doctors are still prohibited from performing abortions on women whose lives are endangered in labor or are carrying a fetus with a fatal abnormality. The same restriction applies to women who have been the victims of rape or incest. In fact, the 14-year sentence for self-abortion tends to be doubled in cases of rape.

 In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights found Ireland to have violated the rights of a woman seeking a termination in Britain. It’s been estimated that from 1980 to 2012, at least 154,573 women living in Ireland traveled to England and Wales to access safe abortion services. This averages out to about 4,000 women per year. The actual number may be much higher, but stigma and discrimination impose a vow of silence. The vast majority of Irish women seeking an abortion travel alone, their pregnancy shrouded in secrecy. They receive no support or information from the government. Beyond the psychological and physical difficulty of these journeys, termination in Britain can be prohibitively expensive.

According to the Irish Family Planning Association, “women travelling from Ireland tend to have later abortions because of the need to raise significant funds, organize childcare, negotiate time off work and make travel and accommodation plans. Travelling to the UK for a surgical abortion below 14 weeks of gestation costs at least €1000 [$1,350].” This figure does not include indirect costs such as child care and loss of income. This means, of course, that the option to travel to Britain for a termination is limited to those who can afford it. Indigent women are still forced to resort to incredibly dangerous methods of self-abortion.

From an article by Róisín Davis that can be read in full here