Make Repealing the 8th an Election Issue

Martina Devlin makes a strong call to vote only for parties that will repeal the 8th. If you want it gone, let your local prospective TD’s know what it’ll take to get your vote:

Not in the interests of pregnant women, nor for women in general, but for everyone’s sake – men and women. Ireland must stop covering its eyes. It needs to recognise that exporting a problem is a lazy, irresponsible and dishonest way of coping with it.

The Eighth is the constitutional amendment which gives an embryo and a woman equal status under the law. In effect, it means her physical and emotional health, her autonomy over her body, take second place to a foetus which could not exist independently of her.

This law has been on the statute books for 32 years, and continues to put women’s lives in potential jeopardy today. It helped to kill pregnant dentist Savita Halappanavar. It obliged an asylum seeker, raped as an act of war, to give birth here against her will. It led to a clinically dead woman being kept alive because she was in the early stages of pregnancy, while lawyers argued across her life support machine. It demands that women carrying babies which are incapable of survival continue to full term – a breathtaking act of cruelty. The Eighth should be a source of shame to Ireland. Yet still it remains embedded in the Constitution.

Enough. It must go.

Source: I won’t vote for any party that continues to shirk dealing with Eighth Amendment – Independent.ie