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Letter from Dublin -- Louise Williams on the abortion debate. (Friday, 08 March, 2002, 14:06 GMT)
I was the same age as Anne Lovett when she died. It was 1984 and we were both fifteen-year-old schoolgirls. She died of severe haemorrhaging and exposure after giving birth alone, outdoors, near a statue of the Virgin Mary in a small Irish village. The body of her newborn baby was found beside her.
Anne Lovett had hidden her pregnancy from her schoolfriends, local people and her family. For weeks, my friends and I would discuss her story – who had got her pregnant, how had she managed to hide it, why hadn’t she found a way to go to England to get an abortion.
Anne Lovett and I were from very different backgrounds. I’m from Dublin and my family is liberal; we never belonged to any church. I knew where to get contraceptives under the counter, even when it was illegal in Ireland.
I also knew that on the back of the women’s toilets in Trinity College, you could find the phone numbers of abortion clinics in Britain. It was illegal to publish these numbers, but the back of the toilet doors had become an informal referral point for those in the know.
But what did Anne Lovett know about contraception or abortion? She was from a small village far from Dublin, from a Catholic family. Even if she’d asked her family doctor for advice on contraception, he might have refused to help her, as many rural doctors did in those days.
In the last twenty years, no fewer than five referendums have been put to the Irish people on the issue of abortion. We’ve been described as obsessed with anything to do with the fallopian tubes.
Campaigners from the pro-life group tell me that by voting yes and ruling out suicide as a grounds for allowing abortion, I’d be saving lives. But I remember Anne Lovett.
For Europe Today this is Louise Williams in Dublin.
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