DUBLIN — In 1983 the Irish people voted to give a fertilized egg the same right to life as the woman who carries it. Feminists tried to stop it. We argued that crisis pregnancies were a reality of women’s lives and that we needed the right to choose how to deal with them. We said that the constitutional amendment on the ballot, which made abortion illegal unless the mother’s life is in danger, would harm women. We marched and chanted “Get your rosaries off our ovaries.” A Catholic bishop pronounced that the most dangerous place for a baby was in a woman’s womb.

We lost, overwhelmingly. But Ireland has changed. On May 25, the Irish people will vote on whether to repeal the Eighth Amendment. This time I think we can win.

Contraception had not long been legalized in Ireland in 1983. There was no divorce. The Roman Catholic Church was enormously powerful. I was working at a rape crisis center in Belfast, in Nothern Ireland, and six of us packed into a Mini and crossed the border into the republic to take part in the campaign against the amendment. In Donegal, the most northern county in the Republic, we handed out a poster featuring a drawing by the artist Käthe Kollwitz, of a mother pulled every which way by her needy children. “It’s life that needs amending, not the constitution,” it said. A boy hissed at us that we should be raped and made pregnant. Our posters were flung to the ground.

In Carndonagh, a small town in Donegal with a steep main street dominated by a large Catholic church, two nuns took down our poster and told us to go back to where we came from. Donegal had one of the highest majorities for the amendment in the country.