Resoundingly
The results in the referendum on the Eighth Amendment show the Yes side is ahead by a margin of around 2-to-1.
Most of the 40 constituencies have now finished counting ballot papers and have declared official results.
In what is expected to be the highest Yes vote, 78.4% of voters in Dublin Bay South opted to repeal the Eighth.
On a day described by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar as the “culmination of a quiet revolution”, Galway East was the first constituency to declare a result delivering a decisive Yes vote at 60%.
In the capital all declared constituencies have come in with over 70% for the Yes side.
Donegal looks to be the one constituency that will vote No.
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin said the Oireachtas should move efficiently to enact the will of the people.
The LoveBoth campaign has said exit polls paint a bleak picture for retention of the Eighth Amendment “and represent an abortion regime that has nothing to do with healthcare and everything to do with abortion on demand.”
Nonsense; it has everything to do with healthcare. If it’s a pregnancy you don’t want, it’s nine months of increasing illness and discomfort and disability, ending in X hours of terrible pain and a permanently altered body. If you don’t want it that’s absolutely a healthcare issue. Women who want the baby heroically put up with all of it, but that doesn’t make it a walk in the park.
In Dublin, a nice touch:
She’s deadly @hiheal pic.twitter.com/2nOqTIE37O
— ❤️Phoebe (@IamPhoebe) May 26, 2018
After Eights are a brand of mint chocolates. Brilliant.
My husband bought a t-shirt that just says “Repeal the 8th”. He plans to have fun with people who don’t quite get what it’s about, as they try to decide why he wants to repeal the amendment against cruel and unusual punishment.
Actually, that’s fitting. Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy she does not want is cruel (though unfortunately not unusual).
But from the male point of view it’s highly unusual. If men could get pregnant etc etc etc.
True. My mother always said if men had every other child, no family would ever have more than three…
I’m so pleased about this on a personal level, a political level and a professional level.
On a personal level, many of my husbands family live in Ireland, so it’s always in the back of my mind what would happen to one of them if they found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy or a even a wanted pregnancy that had gone wrong.
On a political level, it’s about time. They’re still talking about fairly strict restrictions (up to 12 weeks of pregnancy only, with later abortions potentially only in certain circumstances (not yet defined). But it’s a start. It’ will produce some peculiar effects with regard to Northern Ireland, but Brexit is going to screw that up anyway, so who knows what will happen. I do wish we could be more open about pregnancy loss – we don’t talk about it, there’s the stupid 12 week rule, and so people think it is very rare when it is not. Nature doesn’t consider fetuses to be sacred, they are discarded with alacrity on a regular basis. I think I read a statistic once (I can’t find it right now, I’m at an airport and the wifi is flaky), that said most women by the age of forty have had at least one miscarriage, but that most didn’t notice anything more than a heavier than usual period that month.
And on a professional level, one of my research areas is pre-eclampsia and eclampsia. This disorder, where the blood pressure begins to rise uncontrollably in a pregnant woman and causes damage to both the woman and her fetus, can be deadly and kills far too many women globally. Sometimes the only treatment is to deliver the baby, whether it’s ready or not. At 34 weeks, that baby has a decent chance at survival. At 26 weeks, it’s chances of survival are very slender indeed. It’s a horrible choice to face for expectant mothers, and nobody should be adding to that burden by imposing arbitrary restrictions on her or her doctor.
YES. IT DOES. But even if it didn’t, why would the default position be to carry an unwanted baby around for months then be responsible for it afterwards? Forced pregnancy would still be terrible even if pregnancy gave you super powers.
It reminds me of the interminable ‘debate’ we had in the 80s about whether or not homosexuality is a choice, as if that made the slightest difference about who people should be allowed to fuck or who people should be allowed to discriminate against.
And while I’m ranting anyway, why does everyone say that human gestation lasts nine months? It’s usually about 40 weeks, isn’t it? That is obviously ten months. Why does everyone say it’s nine? Not at all relevant, but it pisses me off.
We’re having dinner with mrs latsot’s family today. There is no way that I’m not going to find an excuse to use that line.
Everyone is already resigned to the fact that I’ll be sent home in disgrace as usual so I’ll try to get the line in early and get back to my cat.
To see Ireland come so far, while my beloved homeland is dragged into the darkness. To see that yes, they did chant Savita’s name.
I guess Vlad didn’t take an interest.
@latsot #5
re choices:
I have also always been uncomfortable with the homosexuality as choice idea – a person should be able do whatever they want with their body, with or without others, as long as everyone is properly consenting.
As far as I am concerned, abortion choice is completely a matter of bodily autonomy. Even if the fetus is a person, even if pregnancy conferred superpowers, it’s still the woman’s absolute right to decide what happens to her body. Most people are uncomfortable with the idea of mandatory organ donation, or even blood donation (which has much less impact or risk than pregnancy), and most societies even afford corpses a higher level of bodily autonomy than the forced birthers are proposing.
re gestation timing – I’m sure Claire can explain the rationale for this much better than I, but here’s my lay attempt:
40 weeks is 10 lunar months, but 9 calendar/solar months. But it gets even odder – conventional gestation times use the date of the last menstrual period as a start date, which of course is ~2 weeks before the actual fertilization.
latsot, Theo Bromine – my mother (yes, her again…she had a lot of sayings…) always said the first baby could come at any time; the rest all take nine months.