Ireland's Hidden Diaspora: The Abortion Trail and the Making of a London-Irish Underground, 1980-2000

By Ann Rossiter

Every year, large numbers of abortion seekers from Northern Ireland and the Republic travel to clinics on the British mainland to seek a safe and legal abortion denied them on their own turf. They come and go in secret, like being ‘on the run’, bearing a terrible burden of shame for two societies heavily influenced by Christian fundamentalism, Catholic and Protestant. Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora: The Abortion Trail and the Making of a London-Irish Underground, 1980-2000 unmasks the hidden story of London-Irish women who supported abortion seekers before, during and after their lonely and often frightening journey across the Irish Sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9781543926392

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Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora:

The ‘abortion trail’ and the making of a London-Irish underground, 1980-2000

Ann Rossiter a long-standing Irish feminist who has been involved in IWASG and Iasc for many years, is from Bruree, Co. Limerick and has lived in London for nearly half a century. She has also been an activist in feminist groups concerned with women and the Irish National Question, such as Women and Ireland and the London Armagh Group. The latter was set up to oppose the treatment of republican women prisoners, in particular the practice of strip searching. She has written a number of articles and essays on these subjects and holds a doctorate in the history of the encounter between English and Irish feminism during the years of ‘the Troubles’. She taught Irish Studies for over a decade at various institutions, including Kilburn Polytechnic (now the College of North West London), Birkbeck, London Metropolitan, and Luton universities. Currently, she is a member of Speaking of IMELDA (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion) collective, an occasional volunteer for the Abortion Support Network (ASN) and a SisterSupporter.

See Ann Rossiter or www.abortionireland.co.uk

Photojournalist Joanne O’Brien has written a book on Bloody Sunday, ‘A Matter of Minutes’. She is also co-author of a book on Irish women’s emigration to Britain, ‘Across the Water’. Widely published in books, newspapers and magazines, her work was included in the ‘Faces of the Century’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. She has worked in China, the USA & Europe. www.joanneobrien.co.uk.

Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora:

The ‘abortion trail’ and the making of a London-Irish underground, 1980-2000

Ann Rossiter

Photographs by © Joanne O’Brien

Iasc Publishing

London

Published by Iasc Publishing 2009

email: [e-mail]

www.abortionireland.co.uk

Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora:

Copyright © 2009, 2018 by Ann Rossiter

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Photographs by Joanne O’Brien

www.joanneobrien.co.uk

Printed and bound in Great Britain

by Printondemand-worldwide.com

ISBN (Print): 978-0-95617-850-3

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-54392-639-2

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is dedicated to all the women of the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group and the Irish Abortion Solidarity Campaign

An update of pro-choice activism in London from 2009, when this book was first published, is available at http://www.abortionireland.co.uk/ or Ann Rossiter. It covers London-based ‘new girls on the block’, such as the live art group Speaking of IMELDA (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion) and the Abortion Support Group (ASN). It also provides an update of events and campaigning groups in Ireland, North and South.

Contents

Foreword by Ivana Bacik

Foreword by Goretti Horgan

Introduction: Keeping secrets

Book Reviews

CHAPTER 1

Just Another Crisis Pregnancy

‘Sure we’re all Paddies over here’

In search of Irish abortion seekers in ‘dear old Blighty’

CHAPTER 2

Putting Irish things sexual into context

Making sense of it all – the role of culture

Sex as sin: St. Augustine et al

Infanticide versus Abortion in Ireland

Epilogue: in Limbo no longer

CHAPTER 3

‘We were our bit of the Irish community’: the making of the alternative Irish community in London.

Setting the scene

Blazing new trails: the strange mish-mash of female London-Irish life

Creating their own spaces

Multiculturalism, the Irish community and the fallout on Irish feminism in Britain

Multiculturalism – the pros and cons

CHAPTER 4

Beginnings and Bloodlines: the first phase of the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group (IWASG)

She came to stay

The emergence of IWASG as a humanitarian and political project

Legal but not above board

The long road towards fertility control in Ireland

CHAPTER 5

The work of the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group (IWASG)

The key role of British and Spanish organisations in sustaining IWASG

The nuts and bolts of the IWASG support system

Cross-border co-operation – Open Line and the Well Woman in Dublin

Fund-raising activities

The role of the Workers’ Beer Company in IWASG fund-raising

Connections with Irish community organisations

The London Irish Women’s Centre (LIWC)

Action Group for Irish Youth (AGIY)

CHAPTER 6

The Irish abortion seeker as a ‘special case’

Contrasting the impact of religion on Irish, Spanish and other nationalities

Interpretations of ‘Irishness’ on the British street

IWASG, an Irishwomen-only collective

CHAPTER 7

Introducing IWASG Women

Yet another crisis pregnancy: Ann Rossiter’s story

IWASG women – a miscellany of Irish life in London

The way we were

Explaining IWASG’s credo and system of organisation

Sisterhood or feminist philanthropy?

The problem of secrecy

CHAPTER 8

The Irish Abortion Solidarity Campaign (Iasc)

Iasc’s last stand

In the beginning

Making waves with Women on Waves

The survey, The Other Irish Journey

Launching the survey: stranger than fiction

Unlikely bedfellows

Promoting the survey

Women’s community groups – feminist or familist?

By way of conclusion

Nationalising ‘those bellies!’

List of Interviewees

Notes to the Text

Foreword

by Ivana Bacik

Senator, Seanad Éireann, and Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Trinity College, Dublin

Abortion was legalised in Britain in 1967. Every year since then, thousands of Irish women have travelled to clinics in London, Liverpool, and other British cities to obtain abortions denied to them at home. The Irish law on abortion is the most restrictive in Europe. Abortion is a criminal offence in Ireland under 1861 legislation, carrying a penalty of life imprisonment.

In 1983, the law on abortion became even more restrictive when the Republic of Ireland’s Constitution was amended to make the right to life of ‘the unborn’ equal to that of ‘the mother’. A pregnancy may only be terminated legally in order to save the life of the pregnant woman. There is no right to abortion in any other circumstance; even where a woman or girl has been raped or abused.

Despite this highly repressive law, abortion is a reality in the Republic. More than 150,000 southern women and girls have had abortions over the last forty years. Yet these women’s stories are never told publicly in Ireland. The cultural taboo on speaking out about abortion and crisis pregnancy has been strengthened by the intimidatory tactics of the anti-choice campaigners. Abortion represents their last line of defence since contraception and divorce were legalised. These conservative lobbyists have brought disproportionate influence to bear on fearful politicians.

But the tide is turning. At least now it is legal in Irish law to provide women with information on how to obtain abortion in Britain. This was not always so.

In 1989, I was elected President of the Students’ Union at Trinity College Dublin. At that time, students’ unions were the only organisations still publicly providing information about how to access abortion in Britain, after anti-choice groups had closed down women’s counselling centres. In carrying out Union policy by giving information on abortion to women with crisis pregnancies, my fellow Union officers and I were threatened with prison by SPUC (the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child) in a marathon court case. Mary Robinson (later elected President of Ireland) stepped in to defend us in court, and we were not sent to prison, but we lost our case initially and were threatened with bankruptcy.

The case made headlines in 1989 and 1990, and dominated the time I spent with the Students’ Union. As one of the more publicly visible officers, I became the recipient of vitriolic hate mail, was verbally abused by strangers on the street, and encountered opposition even within the students’ movement; not everyone was supportive of the principled stand the Union had taken.

After what can only be described as a difficult year in the Union, I escaped to London to do postgraduate work. During the previous twelve months, I had been deeply moved by the many phone calls I and other officers had taken from women with crisis pregnancies, unable to access the contact details for clinics in Britain and desperate to obtain this information from any source they could. In trying to help them as best we could, we students had become aware of a group of Irish women living in London who offered support, accommodation and assistance to women who had travelled there to seek abortions. This group was called IWASG (Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group), and as soon as I arrived in London I made contact with them and offered to help.

The group was immediately welcoming and invited me along to their next meeting. The women who were there, mostly first and second generation Irish emigrants, were all remarkable individuals. As probably the youngest member at the time (I was then only twenty-two), and having arrived so recently from Ireland after the very difficult year we had had in the students’ movement, I found it immensely empowering to meet so many unashamedly strong, liberated, pro-choice women – all with an Irish cultural background. I greatly valued the friendships I made within the group, which have been strong and long-lasting.

During the three years I lived in London, I became very involved with the work of the group. I attended regular meetings, helped to organise fundraising events, and contributed to supporting individual women who had travelled from Ireland for abortions; by meeting them, putting them up in my London flat, and sometimes escorting them to the clinic they had booked.

I thought the work that IWASG did was enormously important. During the 1980s and 1990s, when abortion was regularly in the headlines in the Republic as different cases were taken and referendum campaigns fought, it was particularly difficult for women to undertake the journey to England. Often this was done in secrecy, with no support from home. The women in IWASG offered very necessary moral support and non-judgemental help to many of the women and girls who travelled. I saw at first hand just how much their work was appreciated.

Since my time with IWASG, the law on information, and public attitudes, have changed for the better in the Republic – even if the law on abortion itself remains highly restrictive. This change has come about as a result of the 1992 X case. The case arose when a fourteen year-old pregnant rape victim, known only as X, wanted to travel to England with her parents to terminate her pregnancy. The State tried to prevent her travelling abroad in order to stop her having the abortion. People were understandably horrified at this inhumane attitude to the girl’s crisis. In the public outcry that followed, the Supreme Court ruled that because X was suicidal, the pregnancy posed a real and substantial risk to her life, so her pregnancy could lawfully be terminated, and she was able to travel to England.

Two referendums were passed later in 1992. The first allowed freedom of information and enabled us students, finally, to win our long-running legal case. The second referendum allowed the right to travel for women seeking abortions. A referendum seeking to overturn the X case by ruling out suicide risk was defeated.

In 2002, following more pressure from anti-abortion groups, yet another referendum was held to try and rule out suicide risk as a ground for abortion – but again this was, thankfully, defeated.

Since then, the law has remained stagnant, and women have continued to travel to Britain in their thousands. To try and bring about change, activists in the Republic have established the Safe and Legal (in Ireland) Abortion Rights Campaign (SLI), with the aim of legalising abortion. The campaign is supporting an important case being taken by three women, A, B and C, against Ireland before the European Court of Human Rights. The women argue that their human rights were breached because they were forced to travel abroad for abortions. This is the first direct challenge to Irish abortion law before the European court.

The SLI campaign has been working to mobilise public support for the legalisation of abortion generally. Opinion polls show that support for legal abortion has increased significantly in recent years. As Irish society has changed and liberalised, most people have become more compassionate towards women with crisis pregnancies.

The only thing that has not changed is the lack of courage and leadership demonstrated by successive Governments in failing to deal with abortion in a realistic and rational way. I believe that it is now time for women in Ireland to challenge the culture of silence and hypocrisy. We must press legislators to confront the reality of crisis pregnancy.

In this campaign for change, we should take inspiration from the work that the committed activists in IWASG and in the campaigning group Iasc have been doing for many years. Their stories, as told in this important book by Ann Rossiter, should provide a valuable source of motivation for the many women who believe, as I do, that it is time for change; time to meet the real health needs of Irish women by legalising abortion in Ireland.

Ivana Bacik, Dublin, 2009.

Foreword

by Goretti Horgan

Alliance for Choice, Derry, Northern Ireland

The law on abortion in Ireland, North and South, is based on the same piece of Victorian legislation – the1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which criminalizes abortion and lays down life imprisonment as the punishment. In Northern Ireland, the law has been updated somewhat by the 1937 ‘Bourne judgement’ – the acquittal of a doctor who in England had performed an abortion on a fourteen year-old pregnant girl as a result of multiple rape. The core of the judgement is that abortion is legal if continuing pregnancy would leave the woman ‘a mental or physical wreck’.

The Bourne judgement is notoriously unclear, which is why the 1967 Abortion Act was introduced in Britain. Both the (Westminster-appointed) Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights and the UN Committee overseeing the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) have criticised Westminster for allowing the lack of clarity to persist in the North and for not acting to end the ‘one law for the rich, another for the poor’ situation.

The lack of clarity in the North was demonstrated when, between 1993 and 1995, four cases on abortion were considered by the Northern Ireland High Court in Wardship proceedings, in each of which permission was given for terminations to be carried out on the basis that the girls and women in question were under-age or legally incapable of consenting to the operation, and that their mental and/or physical health was at risk. These judgements suggest that abortion is legal in Northern Ireland in many more circumstances than is generally realised. It would seem that a large proportion of the women who travel to England for abortions would have a legal right to obtain them within Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, as in the South, doctors are afraid to carry out abortions for ‘social’ reasons although, unlike the South, it is acknowledged that between seventy and one hundred abortions are carried out in the North every year. Most of these are because the woman’s life is in danger or for reasons of foetal abnormality: the abortions carried out for the latter reason are certainly illegal.

The law in the North is, then, a mess, and it’s vulnerable women who are made to pay the price.

Established in the late 1990s, Alliance for Choice (AfC) is a broad-based non-funded organisation of women and men, Protestant and Catholic, campaigning for the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland and thereby putting an end to this mess. AfC was the result of the convergence of the Right to Choose Group in Derry, in existence since 1986/7, and the remnants of NIALRA, the Northern Ireland Abortion Law Reform Association, based in Belfast and dating back to the late 1960s, which began to wind up in the mid-1990s. AfC is supported by the major trade unions and has activists in most parts of the region – from Newry to Enniskillen, Belfast to Derry and most points in between.

AfC has, of necessity, focused mainly on helping get the money together for abortions in Britain and, increasingly, in Holland and Belgium where the procedure costs considerably less. The work has always been difficult and frequently stressful, and would have been impossible to maintain without the support and assistance of the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group, to whom many Irish women will be forever grateful.

If you’ve never left Ireland before, having someone to meet you in London and, for example, help you negotiate the Tube, it is a huge relief. Many women came back and told us that being able to stay with someone who ‘knows the score’ helped them greatly to get through the experience. A combination of cheap flights, internet access and changes to the regulations in Britain means it is now possible to Google the information, make an appointment with a clinic, travel, have an abortion and return to Ireland on the same day. As a result, IWASG is no longer as necessary as it once was. But it is still sometimes needed.

Most of AfC’s early campaigning work was at the beginning of New Labour’s period in government when many believed that the Labour Party would implement its promise to extend the Act. Instead, it became clear that during the negotiations on the 1998 Peace Agreement a deal had been done with the local political parties NOT to extend the Act. Concern for women’s rights was discarded again in 2008 when Gordon Brown and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) negotiated an arrangement whereby the DUP voted at the Westminster Parliament for ‘terrorist’ suspects to be detained without charge for forty-two days in return for New Labour scuppering any attempt to extend the Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. This is but one more example of draconian measures being taken under the smokescreen of ‘security’ and ‘anti-terror’.

As well as working to get the Act extended, Alliance for Choice aims to ‘tell the truth about abortion’, to counteract the lies of the anti-abortionists. We want people in Northern Ireland to stop pretending we ‘don’t want abortion here’ while approximately 1,500 women giving Northern Irish addresses access an abortion in Britain each year. Many more may give false British