Understandably, given recent and ongoing controversies over the Irish abortion question, much has been made of the figure of 150,000 women who have travelled to Britain for abortions since the 1983 referendum resulted in the insertion of the eighth amendment into the Irish Constitution. The Irish abortion issue, however, has a much longer history than that covered by the last 30 years.

Even when abortion was illegal in Britain, before 1967, Irish women made the trip, as they did to other European cities. A contributor to Seán Ó Faoláin’s The Bell magazine in 1941 suggested some young women from well-off backgrounds were “hustled off, normally to London, Paris, Biarritz, come back without the baby, and nobody is any the wiser”.

In a country where there was such a stigma around illegitimacy, this is hardly surprising, nor is the frequency with which less-well-off women opted for infanticide. The Irish abortion question has always been linked to class, secrecy and moral judgment.

Felony

Penal servitude

In a simplistic and lazy way, the words “Nurse Cadden” became synonymous with evil. There were all sorts of rumours about the extent of her supposed monstrosity, without an acknowledgment of what enabled her to stay in business.

That is what it was to her, a business, and Cadden did not make any bones about why she did it – to make money so that she could live with a degree of ostentation unavailable to most midwives.

In the modern era, the charge of murder against Cadden would not have withstood legal challenge. The botched operation – the pumping of a mixture of water and disinfectant into the womb created an air embolism that killed O’Reilly – was accidental.

Helen O’Reilly was a 33-year-old mother-of-six whose husband had deserted her and who was forced to put her children in care in various convents. She had already tried and failed to induce a miscarriage through the use of abortifacient drugs. Her plight must have been replicated all over the country. But O’Reilly was forgotten; it was Cadden who was remembered and she ended her days in Dundrum Mental Hospital as a convicted murderer.

In 1983, the late journalist Mary Holland made a significant intervention in the debate on abortion by writing of her own experience of having an abortion. A decision to go public with this information was rare and it remains rare (Holland received hate mail and was subjected to ferocious criticism). Over 20 years later, in 1995, Holland found herself coming back to the issue and what she regarded as the lack of honest discourse and political bravery apparent in the failure to legislate for the 1992 X case.

She wrote: “It would be an enormous relief if some younger woman or women were to start writing about the issue of abortion from personal experience and leave me to the relatively easy task of analysing the peace process. Please.”

Few chose to do that. While the figure of 150,000 women travelling outside of Ireland for abortions since the 1983 amendment is a reminder of the extent and volume of the personal experiences referred to by Holland, they understandably remain for the most part, with some notable exceptions, intensely private experiences. Discourse about these experiences has not reached the level that we have come to associate with other large numbers of people in our recent history who have experienced exclusion, humiliation and the consequences of a burying of heads in sand.

In 2000, journalist Medb Ruane concluded that in relation to Irish women and abortion, “theological and legal arguments supplant the personal testimony of women”.

While that observation is still relevant, what has become more apparent is the power of individual stories associated with the abortion question to challenge that supplanting, including that of Savita Halappanavar who died in 2012, and most recently, that of the young rape victim at the centre of the current controversy.

What might in the decades prior to the 1990s have remained hidden, or been seen as quite abstract, becomes something entirely different; personal stories lay bare uncomfortable truths and disturbing realities about the treatment of pregnant women who do not want to continue with their pregnancies, and these stories can influence a change in opinion on what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Tortured question

The history of the abortion question in Ireland does not suggest these problems will be addressed to the satisfaction of most; what will also continue for many pregnant women is the journey abroad. The 2013 Bill for most women with a crisis pregnancy will appear restrictive, abstract and ultimately irrelevant, while for those not in a position to act independently, things are bleaker still.

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD