It is time for Ireland to legalize abortion law once and for all. An Amnesty International report, released on Tuesday, reveals what the human rights organization calls the “devastating impact” of Ireland’s ban on abortion: grieving women forced to carry dying fetuses to term, rape and incest victims with no recourse, even suicidal women - who legally should be able to obtain abortions - having their rights violated and lives put at risk.

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The report comes two and a half years after the preventable death of Savita Halappanavar and almost a year after a suicidal teenager - a rape victim - was denied an abortion. In Ireland, abortion is only available to women who are in immediate danger of dying if they don’t have the procedure, and women who have illegal abortions are faced with 14 years in prison. (A sobering fact for the anti-choice organizations in the US who continue to insist that if abortion were illegal, women who got them wouldn’t be criminalized.)



Amnesty calls the Irish abortion law “part of a broader social and political environment in which women and girls have been subject to strict, punitive social controls around their sexuality”, and the report criticizes the vague legal exception for women’s lives.

The on-going lack of clarity in the law ... means that pregnant women and girls in need of an abortion for medical reasons are essentially forced to wait until their condition deteriorates sufficiently in order to justify a medical intervention.

Sick women are legally unable to receive the help that they need until they are at death’s door. And those women who face serious health risks that won’t necessarily result in death - like cancer, heart disease or organ damage - are unable to get help at all. Sickness and its potential fatal dangers are not so clear-cut, which Irish lawmakers should be well aware of. After all, this exception was largely put in place after public outrage over Halappanavar’s death - a tragedy that demonstrates just how necessary it is for medical care and judgement to trump politics.

Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian dentist who was 17 weeks pregnant, went to Galway University Hospital in 2012 with severe back pain. That same day, she and her husband were informed that she was miscarrying. But because a fetal heartbeat was still present, she was denied an abortion. Savita’s pain and condition got worse over the course of days, and still, her request for an abortion was denied. She died of septic shock, in pain and in a hospital that was fully equipped and able to save her life.



There are many stories of women in Ireland with doomed pregnancies, like Gaye Edwards’, who was interviewed for the Amnesty report. When Edwards was 20 weeks pregnant, she and her husband found out that their fetus was missing part of its brain and would not live. Still, Edwards was told that she would have to carry the pregnancy to term. Her husband, Gerry, told Amnesty: “Gaye just couldn’t face going to work ... At this stage, total strangers were putting their hands on the bump, and saying you must be so excited.”

The Edwards family did what 4,000 other women in Ireland do every year (those that are able to afford the expense) - they left the country in order to end the pregnancy. But because they did this, they had to have their son’s remains shipped to them back in Ireland. Gerry said: “That was our funeral ... a fucking envelope handed over the door … If we had continued in our hospital, we could have been under the same care, our families could have seen him, we could have waked him, he could have had a funeral.”

The United Nations already classifies a lack of access to abortion as torture, and reading stories’ like Gaye Edwards’ or Savita Halappanavar’s makes it easy to understand why. So the question remains: how long will Ireland continue to torture women?