Feminist Ire

Savita, abortion and the right to health in international law

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Wendy Lyon

Commentary around the Savita Halappanavar inquest has, understandably, focused on the Irish constitutional law context but I haven’t seen much discussion about the breach of her rights under international law.

This is perhaps unsurprising, as abortion itself has a nebulous standing in international human rights law. As its opponents never tire of pointing out, it isn’t protected per se in most of the world’s major human rights treaties. The only real exception is in the 2003 Maputo Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights – that continent’s counterpart to the European Convention – which sets out in Article 14(2):

States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to:
…
(c) protect the reproductive rights of women by authorising medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the foetus.

None of the human rights treaties to which Ireland is party even mention the word “abortion”, though that doesn’t mean they can’t protect the right in limited circumstances. The obvious example of this is the European Court of Human Rights decision in ABC v Ireland, which held the State in breach of an applicant’s right to her private life for failing to provide a clear mechanism by which she could establish and exercise her right to a legal abortion. This is similar to the way that other treaty monitoring bodies have approached the issue, such as the UN Human Rights Committee in KL v Peru and the CEDAW committee in LC v Peru. In both cases, the decision wasn’t that there was a right to abortion per se in the relevant treaty (respectively, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), but that the particular abortion sought would have been legal under state law and thus various treaty provisions were breached by denying the petitioner access to it.

But what I want to talk about here is a more general right – namely, the right to health, and how it was breached in Savita’s case. The right to health is protected in a number of treaties that Ireland is party to, most importantly under Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Then there’s CEDAW, mentioned above, which has its own Article 12 protections for women’s health, while in the European Social Charter, “The right to protection of health” is set out in Article 11. It’s important to realise that these treaties are all fully binding on Ireland as a matter of international law. There’s often confusion on this point, because Ireland has a “dualist” system which means a treaty isn’t domestically enforceable unless it’s incorporated into national law by the Oireachtas (as with the European Convention on Human Rights Act 2003). You can’t go down to the High Court to sue the State for breaching your ICESCR rights – in fact, at the moment you can’t go anywhere. But it’s still legally obliged to protect them, even though there’s not much you can do if it doesn’t.

In and of itself, the fact that Savita died wholly avoidably in a public hospital proves the State’s failure to protect her right to health. If her death really had been due only to the “system failures” we keep hearing about, then perhaps we could chalk it down to a one-off, individual failure. But the more we hear from the inquest, the more apparent the truth becomes: the breach is in the law itself, not merely the way it was implemented or (mis)understood by her medical team. In fact, even if she had survived – and I know of a few women in similar circumstances who, thankfully, did – her right to health would still have been violated. Ireland’s ban on abortions in all but life-threatening cases will inevitably violate the right to health in those cases that fall short of the “real and substantial risk” threshold set by the Supreme Court. Here’s why.

The most widely-accepted definition of the right to health – the Article 12 ICESCR definition – is the “right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health”. The General Comment on this right by the treaty’s monitoring body, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, goes quite a bit further in defining that to include “the right to control one’s health and body, including sexual and reproductive freedom”. This is a fairly unambiguous, though legally non-binding, interpretation. But we don’t even have to go there, because on the plain terms of Article 12, you cannot enjoy the highest attainable standard of health if you’re denied an abortion that you need for the sake of your health. Simple as – and there’s no getting around it by hypothesising whether Physical or Mental Condition X would entitle someone to an abortion under this rule. Yes, there may be cases where it’s uncertain if abortion really is indicated for health reasons, but that’s completely beside the point: Irish law doesn’t allow for any of them if you aren’t considered likely to die otherwise. An absolute prohibition on “therapeutic” abortions for non-life threatening cases is not made compatible with the right to health just because it’s not always easy to determine who needs a therapeutic abortion.

“But rights aren’t absolute”, I hear you say. Well no, they aren’t, but when they’re guaranteed in a legally-binding treaty they can only be limited under the terms set out in that treaty. The ICESCR limitations clause, Article 4, states that the rights can be subjected

only to such limitations as are determined by law only in so far as this may be compatible with the nature of these rights and solely for the purpose of promoting the general welfare in a democratic society.

Now, admittedly, this is a bit woolly, and a casual reading might well lend itself to a utilitarian interpretation, or suggest that a society which considers abortion a generally bad thing could legitimately consider an abortion ban to promote society’s general welfare. It’s not an absurd argument, on its face.

But it’s also not supported by the aids we have to interpret the meaning of the text. The Convention’s travaux préparatoires – the official records of the negotiation process (not online, but detailed in this book) – don’t exactly explain what the drafters of Article 4 had in mind. They do, however, show the rejection of various proposals to include grounds of public order, public morality and the interests of the community – all things which might suggest a person’s rights could be trumped in the interests of some aspirational “greater good”. The CESCR, for its part, states that Article 4

is primarily intended to protect the rights of individuals rather than to permit the imposition of limitations by States

which would mean that the State has a heavy burden of proof in justifying any such limitations.

In Irish law, of course, this is met by Article 40.3.3’s protection of “the right to life of the unborn”. But that won’t cut it in international law, because there is no right to life of the unborn in international law. (As with the “right to abortion”, there is one exception, but it’s in a treaty that Ireland isn’t party to – the American Convention on Human Rights). And again, in terms of the treaties we’ve ratified that protect the right to life – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the European Convention on Human Rights – there is either travaux or case law leaving the foetus out of this protection. (This nifty fact sheet from the Center for Reproductive Rights has lots more detail about this.) So the balancing exercise that would be required to make the denial of therapeutic abortion compatible with the ICESCR is, in international legal terms, simply a nonsense. There is no legal “individual” to balance the woman’s rights against.

There’s another way in which I think Savita’s right to health was infringed, and that’s in the discriminatory way her health needs were dealt with. Article 2 ICESCR requires that the Covenant’s rights be protected “without discrimination of any kind”. Patently, there was discrimination in her case: she was treated differently because she was pregnant. A non-pregnant person would not have had a medically-indicated course of action refused to them at a time of comparable need. There may also be an issue around the antibiotic she was given, which wasn’t strong enough but was “recommended for use in maternal cases”. I’ve found the newspaper reports on this a bit unclear, and I’m not sure whether she was purposely given a weaker antibiotic because she was pregnant, or whether the staff simply didn’t realise, when they gave her the one they always give the pregnant women, that her infection needed a stronger dose. If it’s the former, then she clearly received discriminatory treatment – especially given that it was already known her foetus wouldn’t survive and anyway, she’d already asked for an abortion. The use of less effective medication in the interests of foetal health may certainly be justified, with the woman’s consent, in a wanted and viable pregnancy. But this wasn’t one of those cases.

I said earlier that there’s no place we can go to complain about a breach of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Well, that could change in the near future. The Covenant’s Optional Protocol, which allows individuals to bring complaints to the treaty’s monitoring body, will come into force on the 5^th of May. Ireland has yet to ratify the Protocol, but it did finally sign it last year and ratification is the next step. Again, since this is international law, the CESCR won’t have enforcement powers – but there’s plenty of potential to shine the world’s spotlight on Ireland, and how it fails to adhere to its international obligations. Abortion rights campaigners should call for the government to ratify the Protocol now.

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Posted in Abortion, Equality, Health, Reproduction and tagged international law, right to health, savita. Bookmark the permalink.

Expert in Savita inquiry confirms Irish women get lower standard of care with chorioamnionitis

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Wendy Lyon

The furious attempts by anti-choicers to portray Savita’s death as an issue of negligence rather than Ireland’s abortion law overlooks some very simple facts. The law is the reason Savita’s request for an abortion was denied. The law is the reason Savita’s medical team were forced to assess her illness by reference to whether she met some vague and ill-defined threshold of sick enough before they could accede to her request. The law is the reason preservation of her foetus was given such priority.

Here, an OB/GYN with expertise in infectious diseases, practicing in a jurisdiction without such a law, describes how she would have assessed Savita’s condition – not being constrained by the threat of prosecution to look for any possible chance, however remote, that a (clearly unviable) foetus could be saved.

Enduring (the) Myths: Sex Work, Decriminalisation and the Nordic Model

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Nine

“When prohibitionists do cite other researchers’ findings, they sometimes distort the results and assert the exact opposite of what the cited researchers found.”

– Ronald Weitzer, The Mythology of Prostitution: Advocacy Research and Public Policy (2010)

In early March 2013, the Huffington Post published an article with the title Debunking The Myths: Why Legalising Prostitution Is A Terrible Idea. I was not desperately keen to read it, but I proceeded to anyway because I am generally interested in what people are saying about sex work. And then I was angry. And then I went away and did something else, but I’ve had to come back to it again, a month later, because this one has specific features that make me particularly angry, and I need to share with you what they are.

It was written by Jacqui Hunt, London director of Equality Now. And despite its title, its scope is not limited to legalisation: she believes decriminalisation is an equally bad idea. At first glance, her article looks fairly reasonable and well researched, citing studies from various countries in which sex work has been legalised or decriminalised. It should be noted, however, that any legal model can be tweaked: whichever approach to sex work is selected by authorities, sex workers’ rights and well-being may or may not be prioritised in the accompanying legislation. Germany’s legalisation model is not identical to Austria’s (given the choice, I’d pick Germany). This means that negative outcomes might very well indicate the need for better legislation, rather than conclusive proof that legalisation or decriminalisation should never be entertained again. On the other hand, criminalising sex workers’ clients, as per the Nordic model, has specific, negative repercussions for sex workers’ safety, and there is no conceivable way to criminalise clients that won’t result in those negative repercussions.

I’m not going to address each and every claim Hunt makes about legalisation or decriminalisation: my intention in writing this post is, instead, to examine the ways in which some of her claims have been made, ways which I believe undermine her credibility. My main interest here is in references she makes to New Zealand, where I recently visited the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) to specifically discuss the effects of decriminalisation. And because the primary source for her observations on New Zealand reveals a markedly different picture from the one she has chosen to paint, I’m given to feel that all of her claims ought to be thoroughly investigated before anyone takes them as gospel.

Read the rest of this entry →

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Posted in Dodgy stats, Equality, feminism, Harm reduction, Health, Sex work, Violence against women. Bookmark the permalink.

The Logistics of Arranging Abortions

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Stephanie Lord

The thing about being a pro-choice activist is that perhaps unsurprisingly, people want to talk to me about abortion. A lot. People will tell me their own abortion stories or ones they’ve heard. I’ve had people who are just barely friends of friends tell me stories of how they’ve travelled on their own with barely enough money to have an abortion in an English clinic.

Sometimes I will be the only person that they will ever tell in their whole lives that they had an abortion.

They place their trust in me because they think I am the only person they can tell without being judged for their decision, and even then they’re never quite sure, but maybe it just felt good to tell someone. I feel sad that they couldn’t tell their Mam or their sister or husband, and sad they had to go through that. And I never tell anyone.

Sometimes though, someone will come to me in crisis and ask for advice on how to arrange their abortion because they don’t know how to navigate such things. How would they? It’s not something that people have an emergency plan for. An escape route as such. They don’t teach you that in school. There’s no organisation out there that you can ring and say, “Hey. I’m in Ireland. I’m in a crisis pregnancy situation, please make the requisite arrangements for me, you can start with getting me the days off work and booking my flights.”

“Crisis” never seems an adequate word to describe these situations that women find themselves in. Sometimes it’s utter terror and sheer undiluted panic.

There’s always a lot of talk about abortion as an abstract concept unconnected to real women but merely represented by letters of the alphabet, X, C, D, A, B, C. But fifteen women leave Ireland every day to have abortions in England. These women are your mothers, your aunts, your sisters, your daughters, your friends, your girlfriends and your wives. They have names, and feelings and the awful experience of having had to work out the logistics of travelling overseas to have an expensive medical procedure they should be able to get in their own local clinic for free.

If you are asked for advice, whether you’re an activist or their friend, you might have to ask them some questions. They are the questions that people don’t think of. They are the things that are irrelevant to those who make the decisions around the provision of women’s medical treatments in Ireland. They are the logistics of arranging abortions.

Do you have the internet? If you have, do you know how to delete your browser history so that your violent partner doesn’t know what you’re up to? Can you go to an internet café where nobody knows you? Bring tissues just in case. Do you know the number of the local women’s refuge?

Have you been to the doctor? How far along are you? Do you know the further along you are, the more expensive an abortion is? Can you get a loan from a Credit Union? Or will you go to a money lender? Do you have anything you can sell to raise the money? Can you lie to your parents or friends to borrow money? Can you max your credit card? Do you even have a credit card? Are there any bills that you can get away with not paying this month? Have you gone through all your old coats and looked down the back of the sofa? How long will it take for you to get €1,000 together? Can you get an extra €20 off the Community Welfare Officer? Can you not buy coal for the next few weeks? Are you on the dole? Can you use your savings? Can you defer your year at college and save the money for your Master’s Degree again? Is it Christmastime? Can you return any gifts for a refund or sell them for cash?

Women with money have options, women with nothing have babies.

Do you have travel documents? A passport is €80 and Ryanair will only let you travel with a passport. Can you get a Driver’s Licence? You’ve lost it? Aer Lingus will let you travel on a work ID. Your work ID doesn’t have a photo on it? You’ll need a passport then.

Are you an Asylum Seeker? Ok, then you need to get travel documents that will allow you to re-enter the state. Who is your solicitor? Is he or she pro choice? How much does he or she charge to help you with this?

How are you fixed for time? Can you only travel on a Sunday because that’s the only day you can “disappear” for where people won’t ask questions? Ok, but you know that it will be tough to get an appointment because there are less than a handful of clinics that will open on a Sunday? Most are closed Sundays. Many are closed on Saturdays. But you better have a fall-back plan because some of the clinics that open on certain days can’t do certain procedures. Do you have a fall back plan? Can you go home to Ireland and come back on Friday? Are you in the middle of your Leaving Cert.? Do you have to wait until after your exams to travel? Will that be more or less stressful?

How do you know that the clinic you’re looking at is actually a clinic and not a rogue crisis pregnancy agency?

Have you been able to figure out how to transfer money from Euros to Pounds without someone noticing on the bank statement?

Have you managed to get the day off work? Will you be calling in sick? Do you need two days off? Do you have any annual leave days left?

Do you live near the airport? Can you take a taxi to the airport? Don’t forget, the taxi driver will make idle chit-chat and ask you where you’re going once he hears ‘airport’. Don’t panic, he doesn’t know it’s for an abortion. Tell him you’re visiting an Aunt.

Or are you from down the country? Can you take a night bus and sleep in the airport to get the 7 am flight? Have you remembered your passport?

Did you manage to get someone to mind your kids? Or are you going on your own because your partner is watching them? Do you still have a partner? Is he supportive of your decision or, when you showed him the results of the pregnancy test did he walk out the door?

Or do you live in Shannon or Knock where there is only one flight out per day and due to the time of that flight, you have to stay overnight two days? Can you tell your partner you’re going to a hen weekend or something? Or a work conference? Or will you tell the truth?

How is your health in general? Have you told your GP? It’s not ectopic? Is your BMI ok? Because if it’s really high, the clinic could send you home from England without having an abortion because that procedure is only done in some places. Can you come back again next Friday? I know that means more flights, more days off work, and now you’re over 14 weeks which makes it more expensive but this is what we’re dealing with.

Do you definitely know how far along you are? Sometimes a woman can end up at a clinic and realise that she’s a little further along than she thought because she couldn’t get the money together and only a few clinics go past 18 weeks. As different doctors have different specialities, some doctors only provide treatment to 12 weeks.

Is this a pregnancy you wanted but you’ve been told that the foetus won’t survive to birth? Do you have a health condition that means you have to have an abortion? Is it something to do with blood clots because pregnancy increases the risk of blood clots so maybe you should get the ferry instead of the plane, and I know it’s a five hour train journey when you get there but there isn’t any other option I’m afraid.

Do you know how to get from the airport to the abortion clinic? Some clinics have a free taxi service but most don’t. Some provide pick up service but after the appointment you’re on your own. Have you checked the bus times?

I know you’ll be gasping for a cup of tea after sleeping in the airport but remember you can only have water just in case an anaesthetic is needed and you can’t eat. Or smoke, but what’s there to be nervous about, right? It’ll all be over soon.

Don’t worry, you’ll be ok, you shouldn’t have had to go through this but there are people working to change this awful, awful situation. I promise you.

28 Comments

Posted in Abortion and tagged abortion, feminism, women. Bookmark the permalink.

Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t listen – Joan Smith on the Swedish sex trade law

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Wendy Lyon

Yesterday, the Independent ran this article by Joan Smith about Sweden’s sex trade law. Joan Smith is, in her own words, a “feminist author and columnist” and the essence of her article was that the law criminalising clients is an unqualified success.

This is despite the fact that she seemingly didn’t speak to a single member of the group most affected by the law, by which I mean Swedish sex workers. Her investigative method was to “jump in a squad car with local police” as they tailed working women around the streets of Stockholm, and then to uncritically report what those police told her.

Jem over at It’s Just A Hobby has already passionately conveyed her feelings about sex workers being ignored in this way. Please go and read her post and come back here when you’re done. If you only have time to read hers or mine, read hers. It’s more important.

For those of you who made it back here, I just want to add a couple things. The refusal to listen to sex workers’ voices isn’t only offensive, insulting and pretty much without parallel (would Smith “investigate” the results of a law on domestic violence without speaking to women who’d experienced it? Would she take police at face value that they had improved their handling of rape cases without asking rape victims if they agreed?), it’s also bad policy. It means she isn’t – can’t be – getting the full picture. She isn’t even asking all the relevant questions.

Just to give a few examples from that piece:

“The woman, who hasn’t broken any law, is offered help from social services if she wants to leave prostitution. Otherwise, she’s allowed to go.”

Did she accept the help? If not, why not? Has she accepted the help before? If so, why is she still on the streets? Now that she’s lost the income from that client, how will she compensate for it?

“[The national rapporteur on trafficking in human beings] talks about why women end up in prostitution, citing research that shows a history of childhood sexual abuse, compounded by problems with drugs and alcohol.”

Does that narrative accurately describe you? Were there different or other factors that brought you where you are [and that Sweden will need to address if it wants to get you out of the sex industry and prevent others like you from entering]?

“Where 70 or 80 women used to sell sex outdoors, these days it’s between five and 10 in winter, 25 in summer.”

What happened to the missing women? Did they just go indoors? Did they leave Sweden (perhaps to work in a country where the clients aren’t as well-behaved as the cop claims the Swedish clients are)? Did they find “straight” jobs, or did they have to turn to other less desirable ways of earning income? Are they all even still alive?

“Before 1999, most women in street prostitution in Stockholm were Swedish. Now they’re from the Baltic states or Africa, and have sold sex in other countries as well.”

Why did they come to Sweden? Was the sex trade law itself the draw, or did they come for different reasons but find themselves unable to get any other work? Why aren’t they availing of that “help from social services”?

“They tell Haggstrom’s officers they’re much more likely to be subjected to violence in countries where prostitution has been legalised.”

Do they really?

“one of the criticisms of the law was that it would make prostitution more dangerous. All the Swedish police officers I spoke to insisted this was a myth”

Is it really a myth? Or are sex workers just less likely to report violence to police officers, now that they depend on income from a criminalised source?

“”If a sex buyer can find a prostituted woman in a hotel or apartment, the police can do it,” Haggstrom observes sardonically.”

Is this really true? Or do the police simply not know when they haven’t found a sex worker whom a buyer has found?

“40 women, mostly from Romania, had sufficient confidence in the Swedish criminal justice system to testify against the men exploiting them”

How many women in the sex trade didn’t have sufficient confidence in the criminal justice system to testify?

“In a brightly lit street, Haggstrom points out a couple of Romanian women who work as prostitutes.”

Once again, why are they selling sex in Sweden? Why haven’t they availed of the social services? Why isn’t the Swedish law “working” for them?

My last question there is a key one. Reading this article, I was struck by the number of references in it to women still in the sex trade. The Baltic and African women. The Romanians on the street. The 40 Romanians who testified in last year’s trafficking trials. The woman of undisclosed nationality whose income source was arrested at the start of the article. Even if you buy the Swedish claims that their numbers have dropped precipitously – and remember, those claims relate only to street prostitution, which was only a tiny part of the industry to begin with – there’s obviously still a Swedish sex trade. And the women (and men) working in it are actual human beings who presumably have views on the law and what its consequences have been for them. One would think that those consequences would be at least as important, to a feminist like Joan Smith, as the crude number count. Which in any case clearly excludes these women from the “success” narrative, a fact I’d expect her to also deem worthy of exploration.

But Smith didn’t just consider it irrelevant to ask these women what the law has meant (and hasn’t meant) to them. She also refused to engage with the many sex workers who tweeted her to point out this omission, the sole exception being her dismissive response to Jem. She allowed police officers – people who see it as their mission to drive sex workers out of business, people who have a long history of using sex workers for their own ends in all sorts of nefarious ways (yes, even in post-criminalisation Sweden) – to define their experiences for them.

I have a few words for that type of reporting. “Feminist” isn’t one of them.

7 Comments

Posted in feminism, Sex work and tagged Sweden. Bookmark the permalink.

Leo Varadkar’s World; Where men are men and women are grateful

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Stephanie Lord

Fine Gael’s Leo Varadkar, in a shining example of how to make friends and influence people, excelled himself with his comments indicating that some women may have to give up their jobs in order to avail of the new personal insolvency service. The TD’s comments were picked up in The Irish Examiner;

“I know one or two women who probably don’t make very much money at all from working, but they do it to keep their position on the career ladder, if you like, and that is a legitimate thing to do.

“But if you can’t pay your mortgage as a result, or buy your groceries as a result, then that is something that needs to be taken into account in any insolvency arrangement.

“Nobody is asking anybody to give up their jobs. What is going to happen is that people are going to come forward, they are going to say ‘I can’t pay my debts, I can’t pay my mortgage’, and in that case, the insolvency practitioner will go through with them why they can’t pay their bills, and obviously a creditor is not going to agree to a writedown unless that has been gone through and they can work out what is the most they can pay.”

We all know two income families where there are women working, and realistically they might be just about breaking even due to the cost of childcare. The outrageous cost of childcare is due to the fact that the Government have failed utterly in ensuring a state childcare system that is affordable and accessible for women or dare I say it, state-funded through an equitable taxation system and free to avail of.

Parents do not enjoy paying out the price of a mortgage to have someone mind their children, but they do it because they have to. They think “My child will be in school when they’re 4 or 5, this is hard but it’s only for a few years.” Working mothers will often add on a bit to the end of that sentence, “…this is hard but it’s only for a few years, and at least I’ll still have my job at the end.”

The implication of Varadkar’s comments are clearly that women in those situations where it may be a short-term cost to work should give up their jobs in order to avail of the personal insolvency arrangements. There is no other way of interpreting it.

And make no mistake about it he means women and women only should give up their jobs. Women for the most part earn less than men and it is they who should sacrifice their careers in order to save the family home. If they don’t do this, they can’t partake in the system and if the bank succeeds in having the home repossessed, well it’s Mammy’s fault because that selfish bitch wouldn’t give up her job. Dear Women, Leo Varadkar wants you to pull your socks up and get on with the hoovering because you have no business in trying to make your way in the workplace. That’s man stuff.

The problem with the new personal insolvency arrangements is that they’re wholly inadequate to deal with the level of distressed mortgages and personal indebtedness across the state anyway, so the number of people who will enter them will be limited to say the least. Most women and working mothers who are in debt now, are going to carry on being in debt and no amount of Varadkar’s nauseatingly nonsensical comments will change that.

But in Deputy Leo Varadkar’s world, women after giving up their engagement ring and then sacrificing their jobs because of childcare costs will enter an arrangement with the bank in which they’ll rearrange their debts and mortgage payments. Their children will go to school eventually and they’ll be told to go back to work. Except now there are no jobs so they’ll be dependent on their partner (if they still have a job) or social welfare payments or the kindness of St. Vincent de Paul, because if there’s one thing that Varadkar obviously doesn’t understand, it’s the difficulty that exists for women in attempting to re-enter the workplace after a prolonged absence. The Government is too busy bailing out banks instead of setting about creating jobs, or heaven forbid, doing a fundamental overhaul of how society is structured.

What this demonstrates is how women and women-focused issues are deemed completely irrelevant to the discourse around indebtedness, employment, and even motherhood in Ireland. Who cares if the childcare cost is arguably temporary and leaving her job contains a risk that may result in not getting another job a few years down the road? Who cares that nobody wants to acknowledge that childrearing is a form of labour? Who cares that women are expected to be responsible for childrearing, housework and labour outside of the home? Who cares that it costs up to €2,000 a month to put two children in a crèche? Certainly not the good and the great of Fine Gael.

Nevertheless the focus on women becomes very important when it comes to laying the blame at someone’s door. Just like working class single Mams have been demonised for having children and blamed for their lot of poverty since time began, indebted Mams will now be demonised for not giving up their jobs and sacrificing the family home, or alternatively giving up their job and then being unemployed when their children go to school. Realistically, who is going to stay working when the roof over their head is at risk? One would suspect it’s very few.

For women it’s a lose-lose situation. This is part of a strategy designed to make women work within the home for free to enable men to work outside it for payment. For a State that supposedly extols motherhood and deplores the fact that the reason most Irish women have abortions is because they do not have the financial means to raise children, it’s a particularly peculiar way to act.

Leo Varadkar’s attitude is like something out of an episode of Mad Men, envisioning a world where men are men and women are grateful, but perhaps the women of Dublin West won’t be so grateful at the polling stations during the next general election and if the men had any sense they won’t be so grateful either.

4 Comments

Posted in Politics and tagged debt, feminism, Fine Gael, gender, motherhood, politics, poverty, women. Bookmark the permalink.

Why childbirth should be on the feminist agenda in Ireland

Posted on March 17, 2013 by feministire

Guest post by Sylda Dwyer

The day before Mother’s Day in an emergency Saturday sitting, a High Court judge was asked to compel a pregnant woman to undergo a Caesarean section. According to an affidavit presented in court, Waterford Regional Hospital believed that because the woman was 13 days overdue by their calculations, had a scar on her uterus from a previous C-section and the position of the baby’s head was high, a Caesarean was required. As the woman was refusing to consent to the procedure, the hospital sought an order to enforce the C-section immediately.

The judge heard evidence from the locum consultant obstetrician attending the woman and one other consultant obstetrician from the same hospital who gave his evidence over the phone. No independent or third party opinions were heard. The woman was represented in court by a solicitor paid for by the hospital. Her voice – undisputedly the most important in this potentially precedent-setting case – was absent. We do not know her reasoning for refusing the section except that it was not on religious grounds as the judge sought clarification on this.

We do know the following:

– she believed the hospital had miscalculated her due date and was in fact due on 18 March

– her husband was overseas and therefore unable to support her

– she has a son who was born in 2010 by Caesarean section

– she wanted to deliver this baby naturally

– she was prepared to undergo a C-section if an emergency arose or if the surgery took place on the Sunday or Monday when her husband would be back in the country.

Just minutes before the judge was due to make his ruling, word arrived from the hospital that the woman had consented and that a spinal anaesthetic had been administered. It is unlikely that we will ever know how the judge would have ruled. Either decision would have been a significant landmark in human rights in childbirth in Ireland.

A ruling in favour of the enforced C-section could have potentially opened up the floodgates to medical professionals turning to the courts when coming up against resistance from women who disagreed with hospital policies such as induction and active labour management. Such a ruling would essentially take the decision making power of a pregnant woman out of her hands and in the process remove her right to body autonomy in contravention of her human rights, a situation not unfamiliar to Irish women.

A ruling in favour of the mother would have been a boost to the recognition of a woman’s right to bodily integrity and to make informed decisions about her healthcare during pregnancy, something that is sorely needed in Ireland at the moment.

Either way, this emergency sitting had huge implications for maternity care and women’s human rights in this country.

It is also worth noting that the absence of a ruling meant that no woman in this country has yet been subjected to a court-enforced Caesarean birth against her will and this is cause for celebration. Although it is a dark day for pregnant women’s rights that the situation arose at all, we should be thankful that the horrors that might unfold in a forced C-section have not been realised. One can only imagination the long term negative implications such a birth would have on the baby and its traumatised mother.

So what happened next?

Outside of a couple of articles from the Irish Times, who initially broke the story on Saturday, an excellent opinion piece from Victoria White in the Examiner and some cursory pieces in a smattering of online and print outlets, the media has been deafeningly silent on this case. Apart from reporting the facts that presented themselves in court, no analysis or questioning of the case has been published. No one has asked why an independent expert opinion wasn’t sought, no one has asked why the woman was insistent on refusing consent, no one has queried the fact that one of the consultants claimed that Caesarean sections are “almost risk free”. It would appear that we’re all relieved that this messy business has been neatly swept under the carpet.

There has been no public outcry or a rallying of the troops to support this woman who played such a strong hand to defend her bodily integrity and human rights when most would have conceded to the pressures. In fact, rather than the sound of supporting voices, the loudest noise has been the feverish tapping on keyboards and smartphones as boards, forums and social media have lit up with other women condemning this new mother for daring to question her medical advice, calling her a reckless, selfish, stupid, dangerous, incense-burning hippy who deserves to have her child taken from her.

Rather than an outpouring of sympathy for a woman who felt she knew her own body and her baby best, many believe that the medical opinion was sacrosanct and beyond reproach and therefore the court should have ruled that she be subject to a forced Caesarean. By all accounts, the majority of the female online community have judged that the pregnant woman was fully entitled to bodily integrity and to make decisions about her body and her baby, just as long as they were the “correct’ decisions as deemed by her doctor.

Is seems that as a nation we are happy to accept that there is only one truth to birth and that is the medical system’s truth. Rather than question the policy practices of the Irish maternity system, which prioritises managing as many women through the system as it can, as fast as it can, over the health and wellbeing of mothers and their babies, we are happy to accept routine interventions which often directly lead to complications and traumatic birth experiences with long term health consequences, both physical and psychological.

We have a birth culture in Ireland where women accept that their birth process can be decided on by a medical practitioner. Hospitals dictate when a woman’s labour starts, how is starts, and whether its going fast enough according to a one-size-fits-all policy. Inductions convenient to hospital diaries, but not to a woman whose body simply isn’t quite ready to give birth yet, often fail leading to Caesarean sections that could have been completely avoided if the woman had been given a few extra days for her body to be ready to give birth.

Women already in labour who are deemed not to be progressing sufficiently fast enough to hospital policy, although their body is going at a pace that is working for both mother and baby, have their labour speeded up which can lead to both maternal and foetal distress. Episiotomies, surgically planned incisions of the perineum, are often performed without seeking a woman’s consent and in some cases in spite of her refusal. There is a time and a place for all of these interventions where they are positive and useful tools in successful birth outcomes. The issue is that they have become standard practice without medical indication.

In recent years a whole industry has developed around dealing with the fall out of women’s – and babies – negative birth experiences. Traumatic birth counsellors with expertise in post natal depression and post traumatic stress disorder, cranio-sacral osteopaths, women’s health physiotherapists and perineal specialists are part of mainstream healthcare. These practitioners provide a necessary and important service but surely there are questions to be asked about why so many women and their babies will require these services in the first instance?

Why is it that when the vast majority of pregnancies in Ireland are considered low risk, do we have such a high incidence of intervention and medicalised birth? Why do we accept that giving birth is something horrific that has to be endured as long as we end up with a healthy mother and baby? Who decides what the definition of healthy is? It would appear that we set that standard as simply still being alive, and to hell with the immediate and long term consequences of trauma caused by a medical interventionalist model. It is a low bar.

We unquestionably go along with hospital policies that are put in place to manage the number of women passing through maternity hospital doors and to protect medical professionals against litigation rather than for the best interest of mothers and babies. Rather than allowing labours to begin spontaneously and to progress at a natural pace for the comfort and safety of both mother and baby, hospitals hold full control over the birth process. This model of maternity care is the only example in the healthcare sector of maintaining such control. In any other medical situation, the patient has full control in the decision making process and can walk away without consequence if they don’t consent to medical recommendations. In this same context, it’s worth noting that pregnancy is not an illness, rather a natural physiological process, until medical complications arise.

Given that there are so many births in Ireland every year and child bearing is experienced by so many women, why is childbirth completely ignored by the feminist movement? . We rally to defend the rights of women in early pregnancy to choose how they want their pregnancy to proceed, as we should. Yet there is something about the birth process itself that we have marginalised and dismissed.

When uninterrupted, pregnancy and birth can be a life-affirming, empowering, peaceful and private experience that can result in positive outcomes for both mother and child, including in the post-partum bonding and healing process. So why do we allow it to be taken from us and controlled? The current system of maternity care, while populated with many excellent medical professionals, has administration, logistics and litigation management as its focus rather than mother-led care. Until freedom of choice in childbirth is put front and centre as a priority of the feminist movement in Ireland, alongside pro-choice and equality policies, cases like this High Court sitting will become de rigour and women’s rights in childbirth will continue to be eroded.

Related articles:

Woman agrees to Caesarean after hospital goes to court – Irish Times

Sadly, Ireland doesn’t know best in Ireland’s rigid childbirth regime – Victoria White, Irish Examiner

Caesarean Section Refusal in Ireland – Human Rights in Ireland

No country for pregnant women – AIMS Ireland

Giving birth is a feminist issue – Mind the Baby

Irish hospital prepared to forcibly perform C-section on non consenting woman – Allergic to Patriarchy

NHS NICE Caesarean Guidelines

Sylda Dwyer blogs at http://www.mindthebaby.ie

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Posted in feminism, Health, Reproduction, The family and tagged childbirth, Ireland, maternity care. Bookmark the permalink.

On International Women’s Day

Posted on March 8, 2013 by feministire

This is all.

Happy International Women’s Day. My feminism is intersectional. Solidarity with women of colour, queer & trans* women, and sex workers.

— + Yvonne Aburrow (@vogelbeere) March 8, 2013

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Posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

No, new research does NOT show that violence decreases under the Nordic model

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Wendy Lyon

[Update: in response to communication from Feminist Current’s Meghan Murphy, I am happy to clarify that the article critiqued below is not a “Feminist Current piece” but a Sam Berg piece which Feminist Current merely hosted.]

There’s been a bit of a social media buzz over this article on a radical feminist website, which claims that a recent Pro Sentret report from Norway – which you can read in English here – shows that “violence decreases under the Nordic model”. The author backs up her claims with an impressive array of graphs (and a fair smattering of ad hominems), and unsurprisingly receives glowing praise in her comments from people who were clearly predisposed to believe anything she said on the subject anyway.

I hate to burst their bubble. Well, actually I don’t.

The author kindly linked to one of my own posts on the report, though she seems not to have read it. If she had, she would have noticed that very near the start I referred to “methodological limitations” that made it unsafe to draw cause-and-effect conclusions from the study. At the time I didn’t feel it important to get into those limitations, but I will now. Apart from the health warning that always applies in studying a hidden population, there are two really massively important issues here:

1. Lifetime vs recent experience. The 2007-2008 study asked sex workers if they had ever experienced violence, throughout their “entire career in prostitution (which could be anything from one day to 50 years)”. The newer study asked about violence in the past three years alone. These are two very different questions, which can’t possibly give rise to comparable answers – at least without a detailed examination of the raw data, which we don’t have. We don’t know how long the respondents had been selling sex, in either survey; we don’t know how many in the first study had sold for more than three years nor how many in the second study had sold for less (though 16% of the latter group said they were not selling at the time the survey was carried out). You would expect, of course, that the more actual sex work-years covered by the survey, the more violence would be reported; and if we assume that the first study covered more actual sex work-years then we would expect to see higher rates of violence in it. I’m not even comfortable making that assumption on such flimsy data (which is why I didn’t make it in my initial post). But we certainly cannot make the implicit assumption that the Feminist Current post depends on, ie, that the two studies cover the same number of actual sex work-years.

2. Norwegian vs. foreign experience. Both surveys recorded sex workers’ experience of violence in prostitution wherever it occurred. For the 2012 study, we have a breakdown: 70% of respondents said it only happened in Norway; 12% said Norway and elsewhere; 10% said only elsewhere; 8% didn’t answer. There is also a breakdown of the venues within each country, but that is all. We don’t know, for example, which types of violence occurred in which country, or how many of the specific incidents occurred in which country. This makes it impossible to know how much of the reported violence even took place under the Nordic model. And we don’t have any of this data from the 2007-2008 study, so there’s really nothing for us to compare here at all.

Now, really, that ought to be enough to make it clear that Feminist Current’s claim is totally unsubstantiated. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say we really were comparing like with like. Would that justify their conclusions?

I’ll just address their headline statistic, namely, the claim that rape is down by half in the new study. That comes from here:

And indeed, the drop from 29% to 15% looks impressive. But wait a minute – look over in the left-hand column, halfway down. See that category of “threatened/forced into sex that was not agreed to”? Last I checked, that’s rape. And the number who said it had happened to them in the past three years was not 15%, but 27%.

The Feminist Current author didn’t miss that category of violence – in fact, she commented on it, but totally missed its significance. She also missed what the report’s authors had to say about it, which is as follows:

We have looked at how many checked both answers which could mean that they define both these categories the same way. Only 6 people have done this, which confirms our suspicion that many of the women would not characterize actual rape as rape. This also means that the actual frequency of rape is considerably higher than what is shown in table 10. If we combine the amount that checked these options and then subtract those that checked both we see that as many as 34%(25 people) of those that have experienced violence in the last three years have been raped/threatened into sex that was not agreed to.

So how does the 34% de facto rape rate compare with its 2007-2008 counterpart? To find that out, we’d need the same accounting exercise to be carried out on the earlier data. It could be that in 2007-2008 there was zero overlap between the persons who said they’d experienced rape, and the persons who said they’d been threatened or forced into having sex; this would give us a de facto rape rate of 64%, from which 2012’s 34% would still be an impressive drop. On the other hand, it could be that every person who said in the first study that they’d experienced “rape” also ticked the box for “threatened/forced etc”, which would mean the de facto rate in 2007/2008 was only 35%. In that case, the subsequent drop to 34% would be considerably less impressive, and probably statistically insignificant. The fact is, we simply don’t know.

Finally, since the Feminist Current argument rests entirely on the claim that “serious” violence is down in the 2012 study, I think there’s one other stat in that image worth highlighting:

This of course is subject to the same flaws as everything else in this study, and I’m not pointing it out to suggest that the number of sex workers threatened with a weapon actually has increased under the Nordic model, by 50%, from less than a quarter to approximately a third. I just think it’s kind of…curious that someone who takes the stats at face value, and accuses others of ignoring inconvenient data, doesn’t see any room for this in her analysis of how “serious” violence has changed under the law. But maybe she doesn’t consider “threatened with a weapon” to be serious enough.

There’s a lot more to criticise in that piece if I had more time, not least its contradictions with the radical feminist conception of sex work as inherently violent, inherently rape – and the way it almost mockingly dismisses certain forms of reported violence as not serious enough to be counted as violence for the purpose of this study, while then going on to insist that “any violence inflicted on them matters”. But I’ll let someone else unpack that one. As I said in my first post, we can’t safely draw any conclusion from the stats. The study’s significance lies in its qualitative findings – which are totally inconsistent with the idea of the law as a “success” and which are, unsurprisingly, totally ignored by Feminist Current.

I didn’t have to dig particularly deep into the study to find why the Feminist Current piece is wrong. Pro Sentret are careful to emphasise the lifetime/three years difference. They also highlight the fact that the number of sex workers who report being raped is much higher than the number who call it rape. There’s no reason why anyone who actually read the study wouldn’t be aware of these issues. If they choose not to share them with their audience, that’s a matter for them to explain.

(ETA: More on this subject here.)

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Posted in Dodgy stats, Sex work, Violence against women and tagged Criminalisation, Norway, radical feminism. Bookmark the permalink.

Silent Protest to Counter Anti-Choice Demo TOMORROW

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Aoife

Signal boosting from Unlike Youth Defence, I trust women to decide their lives for themselves:

On Saturday January 19th, a group called ‘vigil for life’ are demonstrating at Merrion Square at 16.30. We’re asking that a number of our followers join us in a counter-demonstration close by.

These people (whether they realise it or not) are protesting against the introduction of legislation that would save the lives of women living in Ireland.

They’re protesting against legislation that the majority have voted for in a referendum.

They’re protesting against a supreme court decision.

They’re protesting directly against what the ECHR says Ireland needs to do to protect the human rights of pregnant women.

We intend to protest silently, without the use of chants or shouting, with signs and pictures of women who have been denied their right to life and health because of this country’s antiquated abortion laws. We have lives too, and its time our government stepped up to protect us.

Please join us in our silent counter-protest. Please bring a sign if you can (it’s as simple as asking a local shop for one of their cardboard stock boxes and using paints or markers) to help get our message across without the need to attempt to shout the other side down.

We will be meeting at Merrion Square South between 4.30 and 4.45. We ask that people coming from town to meet walk across Baggot St, up Lower Fitzwilliam Street and over Merrion Square South (see map below). We ask that people not walk via Merrion Street Upper and past the government buildings, as adversarial confrontation with the Vigil For Life is not our aim in this and they will likely be gathered there. At least one of our members will be waiting at the meeting place early with a large pro-choice sign, so look out for her!

*Image taken from flyposters in Smithfield, December 2012 which were created to highlight the restrictive abortion laws which force women in Ireland to travel abroad while suffering in silence for fear of stigmatisation