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Read, Debate: Engage.
| located: | Ireland |
|---|---|
| editor: | Shira Jeczmien |
Campaigners in Ireland are pushing the final stretch of their campaigns as the country prepares to head to the polls this Friday, May 25th, in a historical referendum on whether to reform the Eighth Amendment: valuing the lives of the mother and fetus equally and forbidding abortion as a result.
Thousands of Irish citizens living abroad prepare to head home to cast their votes in what is currently predicted to be an extremely tight referendum on abortion rights. As voters fundraise flight tickets, Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham and London universities have set up donation stations across campuses to help send their Irish students home to vote. While the hashtags #bemyyes, #homeforvote, #repeal8th are currently trending around the topic. But not all the digital media tools that usually play monumental roles in the advertising and persuasion of political campaigns are taking place this time around.
Following the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook Senate testimony fiasco, Google has banned all advertisements relating to the referendum, which has reportedly damaged the No campaign as it relied on this tool for its voter numbers. Facebook too has limited its use for the campaigns by barring groups from outside of Ireland from paying for advertisements, as well as introducing a new transparency feature that lets users track advertisements online (although it is said to be highly manual and time-consuming).
This referendum is unique and absolutely vital on many accounts. It is a test not only to the Irish values of women’s rights, but also to the success of the country’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar’s call to reform the 1983 amendment as part of his electoral campaign one year ago. Varadkar is Ireland’s first openly homosexual and ethnic minority leader. The referendum also poses an invaluable benchmark for the future of democratic campaigns and elections in a post-Brexit and Trump era, where hopefully and allegedly, the mega-corporations that allow us access to information are at the same time reforming the ways our news is both made and shared. But most importantly, this Friday is about women’s rights to choice.
To say that Ireland boasts archaic policies and vision would be incorrect. On many fronts, including identity, sexual and gender politics it is at the forefront of the discussion, being the first country to fully legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote and to allow the bureaucratic acknowledgement of gender change with a simple tick of a document. The country has also introduced medically supervised injection centres for drug users and decriminalising personal drug use is on the agenda. So why does it still hold one of the strictest abortion laws in any western democracy? Because the right for each and every woman to make her own decision when it comes to the most personal and life-altering circumstance has less to do with Catholic morals or pro-life rhetoric as it does with the continuous female oppression.
In 1983 when the Eighth Amendment was voted on, 63 percent of Ireland’s population supported it. A survey from Sky News on May 21 showed 47 percent supporting reform and 37 percent opposed. Since the imposition of the amendment 35 years ago, 170,000 women have travelled outside of Ireland to access abortion services, paying large sums of money and many times doing so in silence, alone. How many more is Ireland willing to let down during one of the most taxing and vulnerable experiences in a women’s life? Vote yes. Vote yes for reform, for women’s equality, for the right to choice and for a society that respects life as much as it does agency and freedom.
