Anti-choice spinning of California’s 1967 abortion law

We’ve heard a lot lately from anti-choice campaigners about California’s 1967 Therapeutic Abortion Act. It’s being cited to support the argument that legislating for the X case – to allow abortion where a pregnant woman’s life is at risk, including by suicide – will inevitably open the floodgates and effectively allow abortion on demand.

One example is this Tweet from the Pro-Life Campaign’s Cora Sherlock:

California legalised abortion for suicide in 1967. 3 yrs later, 98% of all abs in Cali carried out on this ground @reginado @finegaeltoday

— Cora Sherlock (@CoraSherlock) February 10, 2013

Subsequently, an email circulated to Oireachtas members by a group of anti-choice politicians (parts of which were published in this Irish Independent article) claimed that the California law

was enacted in 1967 on the strict grounds of ‘where the mother was a danger to herself’

And then on the Vincent Browne show the other night, Dr Patricia Casey said that under the law, the woman had to be “certifiable”.

Three different claims about the California law. All wrong.

The actual text of the law was found in §25951 of the California Health and Safety Code. It allowed abortion where a committee, established by the hospital performing the abortion and consisting of at least two licensed physicians and surgeons (or at least three after the 13^th week of pregnancy), found that there was

a substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother

“Mental health”, meanwhile, was defined in §25954 as

mental illness to the extent that the woman is dangerous to herself or to the person or property of others or is in need of supervision or restraint

Right away, we see that the text is logically problematic – how on earth can “mental health” be defined as “mental illness”? – but we don’t need to spend time on that. The more important thing is what the legislators intended in this requirement. Clearly Cora Sherlock got it wrong, because there’s no need that the woman actually be at risk of suicide, and the Oireachtas group also got it wrong, because the element of danger to herself is only one of the possible criteria under the law.

Dr Casey is closest to the truth, but even she is not quite correct. The text is based on an old standard under which a person could be deemed “certifiable” (a term I find a bit offensive, personally, but we’ll put that aside for now) but there is a crucially important difference. The old standard – which was found in §5550 of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code – allowed for involuntary commitment where a person was

dangerous to themselves or to the person or property of others, and are in need of supervision, treatment, care or restraint

What’s changed there is that the “and” was replaced by “or” for the abortion law. To be committed, a person had to be both dangerous and in need of supervision or restraint; to be allowed an abortion on mental health grounds, either was sufficient. So clearly, a lesser threat to mental health was required than that the woman would need to be institutionalised.

Still, it is a fairly high standard, and the anti-choicers are right when they say it was given a much broader interpretation in practice.  But it still doesn’t follow that the Irish law would do the same thing. For one thing, any way you look at it, “dangerous to herself or to the person or property of others or … in need of supervision or restraint” lends itself to a much looser interpretation than “at real or substantial risk of suicide”. (In fact, the California law was struck down as unconstitutionally vague in 1972 – two months before Roe v Wade – precisely because it had proven impossible for doctors to agree on what these criteria meant.)

For another thing, the California law operated in California. California isn’t Ireland, and it always took a more permissive attitude toward abortion. Even before the 1967 Act, it wasn’t actually difficult to get an abortion there – though the standard of care varied widely depending on the quality of provider the woman could afford. Women didn’t need to travel for abortion as they do in Ireland, where doctors are simply not willing to breach the law. It’s unlikely to the point of absurdity that the flexible interpretation applied by California doctors will be repeated here.

A comparable situation is the way that abortion laws are interpreted in Britain and Poland. On paper, the two countries have a pretty similar regime: both allow abortions in case of fatal foetal abnormality or risk to life or health. In practice, however, they couldn’t be more differently applied: Britain, as we all know, is more or less effectively abortion on demand, while Poland is regularly hauled before the European Court of Human Rights for denying even crystal-clearly legal abortions (and in the most appalling circumstances too; the latest example, P and S v Poland, reads like something Franz Kafka might have written with Margaret Atwood). Cultural views, and the constitutional context, have a huge impact on how liberally abortion laws are interpreted – and Ireland is far closer to Poland than Britain in this respect.

The increasing calls of the Irish pro-choice movement to repeal the 8th Amendment are a reflection of this. If legislating for X really would “open the floodgates” and allow abortion on demand, there’d be no need to amend the Constitution. When the legislation gets through eventually, and it will, we will see how little impact it really has on the abortion rate in Ireland. And then we can get on with campaigning for real change.

On “pimps” and policy

The Godwin’s Law of the sex work debate is that inevitably, someone on one side will call someone on the other side a pimp. Most of the time, the person making the accusation will be a supporter of criminalising the purchase of sex – and at least some of the time, the only ground for the accusation is that the other person disagrees. Sometimes, of course, there’s a bit more to it than that – the accused may have picked up a brothel-keeping charge, for example – but seeing as that’s happened to people on both sides of the debate, it’s a fairly unedifying accusation. Even when it’s true.

Of course, the point of the accusation isn’t to improve the debate from an intellectual standpoint; it’s to discredit the person it’s made against. And when it’s made against a person who wants sex work decriminalised, the point is to discredit their entire argument – by suggesting anyone who puts it forward is a “vested interest”, a person who (quoting RTÉ’s Prime Time) “profits from prostitution”, a person who pretends to have the interest of sex workers at heart but really just seeks to exploit them. In this way, supporters of the Swedish model can not only take the high moral ground themselves, but can also add impetus to their argument by portraying the law as an anti-pimp measure (as they did, for example, in this press release last month).

The irony is that there are plenty of reasons to think the law would actually have the opposite effect, and promote pimps and pimping. In 2003 the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and the Police went to Sweden to investigate the outworking of the law, and this is what they reported:

It has been claimed that prostitutes’ dependence on pimps has increased because street prostitutes cannot work as openly. The police informed us that it is more difficult to investigate cases of pimping and trafficking in human beings because prostitution does not take place so openly on the streets anymore….

Prostitutes’ dependence on pimps has probably increased. Someone is needed in the background to arrange transport and new flats so that the women’s activity is more difficult to discover and so that it will attract the attention of the police.

A few years later, this was echoed in a report by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare:

According to one informant in Göteborg, there are probably more pimps involved in prostitution nowadays. The informant says the law against purchasing sexual services has resulted in a larger role and market for pimps, since prostitution cannot take place as openly.

A woman engaged in indoor prostitution in Göteborg relates that when the law took effect in 1999, about ten women engaged in prostitution from various Eastern European countries approached her business because they wanted to hide indoors. Informants from the Stockholm Prostitution Centre also mention that the law has opened the door to middlemen (pimps), because it has become more difficult for sellers and buyers of sexual services to make direct contact with one another.

Norway, meanwhile, has seen the emergence of what you might call “pimp-like” relationships – relationships of extreme dependency, in which the most vulnerable (drug using street workers) become totally reliant on a particular man or men for survival. According to last year’s City of Oslo report,

Among the women with a drug addiction who still sell sex many have changed methods for finding customers. Most of the support services have experienced that the women enter into more long term relations with men who they refer to as “friends”, “boyfriends”, “uncles”, or acquaintances. These are men they stay in contact with through telephones and that they stay with for longer periods, this could be hours, days, or weeks. They have sex with the men in exchange for the men supplying them with drugs, money, and other necessities. Many of the support services say that they perceive the women as being very vulnerable in the relationships. The women become very dependent on the few customers they have.

So where does the idea come from that pimps would oppose criminalising clients? I think in part, it’s the failure of prohibitionists to understand the difference between legalisation and decriminalisation. Admittedly, there isn’t always a clear line between the two, but an essential element of legalisation is that sex work is only lawful under specified conditions. For indoor workers, this usually means that a premise has to meet strict criteria to be deemed a legal brothel – and that certainly can promote “pimping” as prohibitionists would define it. Few self-employed sex workers have the resources or even the desire to wade through that much red tape, so if they don’t want to work illegally and/or alone (depending on the laws of the jurisdiction), they often have little choice but to work for someone else.

But, and here’s the important thing that always seems to get missed, this is not the model advocated by most supporters of sex workers’ rights. Including many of those who are regularly accused of being pimps. A more favoured model would be something along the lines of New Zealand’s, where up to four sex workers can share a premise as a “small owner operated brothel” (SOOB) without the reams of bureaucracy that a managed brothel is subject to – and where sole operators can take the safety precautions they need without putting themselves at risk of arrest, as happens in many “legalisation” jurisdictions. Does this promote pimping? No, it doesn’t. In fact, according to the 2008 report of NZ’s Prostitution Law Review Committee,

Some brothels have closed down with operators citing the lack of staff and increasing competition for workers because of sole operators/SOOBs as reasons for the failure of their business.

You see? Make it easier for people to work without someone managing them, and they’ll have less need for managers. It isn’t really rocket science. In fact, none of this is counter-intuitive, at least for anyone who doesn’t consider the sex industry to be totally sui generis (which it isn’t). I mean, think about it: most people who call for drugs to be legalised are not actually drug dealers themselves. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard a drug dealer call for drugs to be legalised, for bleeding obvious reasons. Nor does anyone ever argue that criminalising drug dealers’ customers makes a dent in drug dealers’ profits – and fewer and fewer seem to think it really deters the customers, either. Why would criminalising the sex industry have an entirely different effect?

I am fully aware that this post is an exercise in futility. Criminalisation advocates are going to keep throwing the accusation around, keep raising the spectre of the Pimp-Monster lurking behind a multitude of Twitter accounts. It’s an emotive tactic, and thus perfect for what has been a heavily emotive campaign. It’s just ironic that its success will be measured by whether it achieves a policy that real pimps may be the first to benefit from.

Why childbirth should be on the feminist agenda in Ireland

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

Racism within white feminist spaces

Reblogged from Black Feminists Manchester:

By Mia

When we talk about ‘white feminist spaces’ what we mean is the default mainstream feminism of the UK, (Europe and USA). A feminism that considers itself superior to women’s movement’s throughout the world, using it’s white privilege to cherry pick which women (of colour) and oppressions are worthy of attention or rescue, viewed through a myopic authoritative white lens.

Read more… 1,080 more words

This piece comes from Britain, but Irish feminists must not see it as irrelevant to feminism in Ireland. One example that jumped out at me immediately was this one: "To involve women of colour as entertainment or free catering service at feminist events whilst failing to involve women of colour in visible lead speaker or panel roles is racist." I can think of a couple recent examples where events were organised to discuss migrant women's experiences, and migrant women did not feature on the panel at all (at least initially, presumably until the exclusion was pointed out to the organisers). I also attended an event not too long ago where a migrant woman spoke powerfully about her negative experiences in Ireland, and when it came to Q&A time a white Irish woman in the audience stood up to express her sympathies...and then addressed a question about this woman's experience to the white Irish NGO worker sitting beside her on the panel.

I'd note also the negative reaction among some Irish feminists to a woman of colour's post on this blog, in which she objected to Islam being used as a bogeyman in the Irish abortion debate (as if Catholicism hasn't been oppressive enough). Among other things, she was told that she should go to a Muslim country and see what things were like there. The assumption by the people who made those comments that they know more about life in her native country than she does - that's also racist.

Any women of colour in Ireland who are reading this - what other examples of racism have you seen within Irish feminism? And what do white Irish feminists need to do better/differently/at all to address this?

Abortion, X and the Eighth Amendment: why legislation isn’t enough.

Abortion, X and the Eighth Amendment: why legislation isn’t enough.

It looks like Ireland is finally going to get legislation on abortion. Following the massive outcry over the fate of Savita Halappanavar, with the publication of the expert group report this week, there’ll be a debate in the Dail tonight on what- not if- to do about legislating for abortion to save pregnant people’s lives. With any luck, we’ll finally get that 20-years-overdue legislation on the X case, guidelines for doctors that spell out their responsibilities when faced with pregnant people whose lives are at risk, and Savita’s death, while unnecessary, will not have been utterly in vain.

But it won’t be enough. Why?

Continues at Consider the Tea Cosy

March for TEA this Saturday!

After #meteorshame, who’s feeling like it’s time that we all stood up to be counted in support of Irish trans people’s rights? I sure as hell am. So’s Aisling from Gaelick:

Hey, quick question, what are all you guys doing on the 20th of October? I know where I’m going to be. I will be outside the Dáil from 2.30, getting my protest on. That’s the day of the Rally for Recognition: Identity NOT Disorder.

The rally marks the International Day of Action for Trans* Depathologisation. If that seems like a paragraph full of made up words to you, don’t worry, sit down, I’ll explain it to you..

Trans* Education and Advocacy, the organisers of the rally, have this to say:

Being gay used to be a mental illness… being trans* still is.

In 2012, trans* people are still not recognised by the Irish State.

Join TEA at the Rally for Recognition to mark International Day of Action for Trans* Depathologisation on Saturday 20 October 2012 at 2.30pm outside Dáil Éireann, Kildare Street, Dublin 2.

For those of you who can’t get enough of waving clever slogans around, TEA will be making placards from 6.30 tomorrow (Wednesday) evening at the Exchange. Come along! There’ll be tea and biscuits!

 

Originally posted at Consider the Tea Cosy. 

Islamophobia at Dublin’s ‘March For Choice’

POSTER READS: ‘Last time I checked I was not living in a sharia state. Religion has no place in legislation! Pro choice”

I saw a picture of this poster in an album of Dublin’s prochoice march.

I don’t understand what the Sharia law has to do with Ireland, the main religion which is catholicism? Why couldn’t it say something about how Catholicism still dominates irish customs?

What does the Sharia law have to do with a catholic country? What’s it to do with Ireland not giving its people access to abortion and aftercare support?

Nothing at fucking all.

Just an excuse to criticize anything to do with islam and/or countries that practice islam. Just another excuse to remind people that there’s something apparently worse out there; sure shouldn’t Westerners be happy we aren’t like ‘those’ countries at least?

Fair enough if Ireland was an islam country whose laws are influenced by its religion which results in restriction to abortion, the poster would then make perfect sense. BUT the sharia law has nothing to do with Ireland so what on earth is the point of this poster exactly?

This sad belief that ‘The West’ is better and more civilized than those barbaric countries with their barbaric religions have got to stop. Dare I say that irritating phrase? ‘I can’t believe this still happens in 2012!’

Awful things happen in the west too; the West isn’t some magical land where all the good lovely stuff exists and all the terrible yucky, racist, sexist, restrictive-laws-influenced-by-religion-which-affects-women only exists in places outside the West.

Where did this idea come from that you should expect great things in a western country that doesn’t have sharia law and if a western country behaves like ‘those’ cultures with the crude religions, it’s something really REALLY bad? Get over this western imperialism, the west is no better in terms of treating it’s people with respect as anywhere else in the world.

I might as well make a sign that reads “Mitt Romney is a racist, legalize abortion now!” for all the sense it makes since some American dude in the US has nothing to do with Irish law and politics.

No one is saying there’s nothing problematic about Romney or the Sharia law but to derail a march to talk about something completely different is tacky and pathetic. I can write about some of the crude, uncivilized, tasteless, primitive things about Ireland- being a state that doesn’t have sharia law doesn’t exempt this country from the unfair ways it treats it’s citizens. Get it together.

Anti-Deportation Ireland launch

(Note: In this post, I’ll be sharing things raised and spoken about at the ADI launch. Because of the risk this could pose to the people in question, however, I’m not going to give their names or any details about them unless I get explicit permission to do so.)

Anti-Deportation Ireland was officially launched on Wednesday morning. ADI is “a national, multi-ethnic grassroots network/alliance of activists, asylum seekers, refugees, community workers, trade unionists, and academics who have come together to campaign against forced deportation in Ireland, and for the abolition of the direct provision system.”. They have three demands:

1. An immediate end to all deportations
2. The immediate abolition of the direct provision system.
3. The right to work for people seeking asylum.

So why these demands? How do direct provision and deportation work in Ireland, and why is it so important to end them?

Direct Provision

Direct provision is how asylum seekers’ basic needs- for food and shelter- are provided in Ireland. Asylum seekers are placed in hostels. Food is provided by these hostels. Because food and shelter are directly provided, the only money people are given is an allowance of €19.50 per week. Until people’s claims have been decided, they do not have the right to work or education in Ireland. The amount of time it can take for a claim to be decided varies hugely- people can spend years waiting for a decision.

Despite the name, direct provision isn’t, well, directly provided by the State. It’s outsourced privately, and because of this becomes a for-profit enterprise. Despite being outsourced, it’s unregulated. Can you see where this is going? People are accommodated three, four, five to a room, with different families sharing a room. The standard of food can be atrocious. Not only is it extremely bad, but in many cases utterly unlike what people are used to in their home countries. And because of direct provision, asylum seekers don’t have the facilities or the rights to even cook their own food.

Complaining about conditions is rarely an option. People who complain about overcrowding are told that they should be grateful that they are not homeless. That they’re taking up room that Irish homeless people don’t have- pitting two extremely vulnerable minorities in this country against each other.

Several people talked about raising their families in direct provision. One woman spoke of how one of her children is too young to remember anything else. How she doesn’t know the difference between a bedroom and a living room and a kitchen. How happy her child is whenever they leave the hostel, and how she hates having to go back ‘home’. Another speaker talked about the particularly Irish way in which cases of child abuse within hostels are dealt with. Perpetrators can be, in a cruel echo of so many other institutions in this country, simply moved from hostel to hostel. This is happening now. And those who complain are often moved themselves, without any right to protest, to other hostels around the country, disrupting any fragile sense of community they might have created where they are. People are denied the right to privacy, to cook their own food, to have a home where they feel safe and where they know how long they can stay.

Right to Work

As well as being forced to live in specific hostels, asylum seekers in Ireland are denied the right to work and education while their claims are being processed- which can take years. On the one hand, this is immensely wasteful. Ireland is in a recession! How many skilled, educated, qualified people are languishing in hostels unable to work, when they could be contributing to society? This also shows the lie of the idea that asylum seekers and migrants are ‘draining’ the system. These people are not permitted to work, even when they want to. On the other hand, years of enforced, stultifying idleness can be devastating for asylum seekers. Not being able to work means that people’s skills get rusty. Work and education are also two of the major ways that people integrate and find a place in communities. Direct provision and the denial of the right to work and study keep asylum seekers separate from Irish society. They mean that people can be here for years with no ability to put down roots and make a home. That Irish people don’t get to work and study beside asylum seekers. That we see asylum seekers as other.

Deportation

Asylum seekers, however, don’t just have to live with direct provision. They also face the constant threat of deportation. On World Refugee Day this year, the 20th of June, 18 people were deported from this country. Twelve of them were children. People are not deported during the day. They are taken from their beds in the middle of the night. When neighbours don’t notice. When people who could help them to appeal are out of work, are asleep. Without notice.

Several people spoke of the constant threat of deportation. About staying awake through the night, sacred this would be the night they’d be forced out. One speaker remarked that even criminals in prison in this country know what they have been sentenced to. They know how long they’ll be there. Asylum seekers don’t have even this security. Another speaker remarked that for asylum seekers, the normal rights accorded people by the legal system are turned upside-down. Asylum seekers are assumed guilty and lying until proven otherwise. The burden of proof is on them, and it is made incredibly difficult to prove themselves innocent. But, as several people asked, why would someone put themselves through this system without good reason? Why would they live like this, for years on end, if they didn’t absolutely need to?

Not okay.

Direct provision, night-time deportations, denial of basic human rights- these things are done by the state to asylum seekers. But as one speaker said, there is a thing line between a refugee and a citizen. Our government has shown that it is willing to trample basic human rights, to engage in a deliberate campaign to other and alienate a group of people. The ‘asylum seeker’ is constructed as scapegoat and a subject for deportation. As Irish people, we need to contest this construction. We need to reach out to people seeking asylum, to hear their stories, to share these stories every way we can. We need to bring the lives of asylum seekers into the light. As one speaker said, “No more secrets. No more lies. No more lying awake every night waiting to be taken away”.

More info on the launch at Cedar Lounge Revolution, Politico, Millstreet.ie and Irish Left Review. Follow ADI on Facebook to find out more about what they are doing and how you can get involved.

Myself and Ariel Silvera also livetweeted this meeting. A summary of these is available here.

Originally posted on my personal blog, Consider The Tea Cosy.

On International Day to Decriminalise Abortion

This afternoon, for (I believe) the first time, the pro-choice movement in Ireland will mark the International Day for Decriminalisation of Abortion with a rally and march through Dublin city centre. It will begin at 2pm at the Spire on O’Connell Street and march to Merrion Square. I will be marching with the Choice Ireland contingent, and hope to see you Irish readers there.

I have reservations about the “Decriminalise Abortion” slogan. To decriminalise something means only the removal of criminal penalties for it; it does not mean that it becomes available, accessible or affordable. We can see this in the United States, where 40 years after Roe vs Wade decriminalised (most) abortions, access is still blocked for many women due to cost, burdensome conditions or simple lack of a provider in their area. If Ireland’s Offences Against the Person Act 1861 was repealed tomorrow, I doubt it would make much difference to the farmer’s daughter in County Leitrim, or to the asylum seeker in Waterford getting €19 a week.

That said, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that Decriminalisation Day was initiated by women in the Global South, not Ireland. I’m certainly not telling them how to campaign in their own part of the world. And there are tragic cases, like that of Rosa Hernandez in the Dominican Republic, where decriminalisation alone really might have made a difference. In no way do I wish to undermine the efforts of women fighting to prevent Rosa’s story repeating itself.

But abortion is a woman’s right, and we must be clear that it is a positive right to which we are entitled and not merely something that the law should not prohibit. Decriminalise it, of course. But let there be no mistaking that for our objective.

On a final note, I’d like to thank Youth Defence for their appalling recent billboard campaign, which has galvanised the Irish pro-choice movement like nothing in the past 20 years. Undoubtedly they’ll undercount our numbers this afternoon and proclaim our march much smaller than the last one they held. And it probably will be smaller than theirs. But the important thing is that ten years or even five years ago, there would have been half as many of us and twice as many of them. Those are the numbers that matter – and don’t think for a moment they don’t know it.

The Irish trade union movement throws sex workers under a bus

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions is an umbrella organisation representing nearly all the active trade unions in Ireland, north and south. A full list of its member unions can be found here (by industry sector) or here (alphabetically).

ICTU has made a submission to the Irish government’s public consultation on the prostitution laws. As you can see here, where their submission is reproduced is full, most of it is just a cut-and-paste job of text sent to them by the Turn Off The Red Light campaign, which seeks the introduction of the Swedish model. But there is one part of ICTU’s original contribution which I found remarkable. A few paragraphs down the submission cites – clearly for the purpose of endorsing – the view of the Technical, Electrical & Engineering Union‘s General Secretary that

prostitution could not be considered “work”

ICTU didn’t invent this view, of course. But it strikes me as taking on a much graver significance when held by trade unionists than by, say, radical feminists or religious puritans. Because the corollary of prostitution not being work is, of course, that the people engaged in it aren’t workers – and are therefore not entitled to the rights that trade unions (theoretically) exist to defend. Effectively, what they’re saying to sex workers who want those rights is: piss off, and call us when you’ve found a real job.

This position puts ICTU at odds with the International Labour Organization, to which it is of course affiliated. While the ILO takes an officially neutral stance on the legal status of sex work, it has made abundantly clear that it recognises the sex industry as a de facto economic sector, and people who sell sex as engaging in a form of labour. In its groundbreaking 1998 report The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia, for example, editor Lin Lean Lim proposes that

For those adult individuals who freely choose sex work, the policy concerns should focus on improving their working conditions and social protection, and ensuring that they are entitled to the same labour rights and benefits as other workers.

The international standards developed by the ILO also reflect this position – albeit impliedly rather than explicitly, in their frequent reference to “all branches of economic activity” (my emphasis). The 1981 Occupational Safety and Health Convention is an example.

And what about the jurisdictions which have actually incorporated those standards into their own laws around sex work, such as New Zealand?

Abel, Fitzgerald and Brunton, “The Impact of the Prostitution Reform Act on the Health and Safety of Sex Workers” (2007)

The phenomenal figures in the last three rows of that table are the consequence of legislation which was expressly designed to treat sex work as work – legislation, in other words, designed to do exactly what ICTU says the law shouldn’t do. And thus ICTU, which is a trade union body hence theoretically a workers’ rights organisation, would reject a framework agreed to be rights-protective by over 90% of the workers operating within it, because they don’t consider them “workers” to begin with. ICTU policy would take those rights away from them.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of a parallel to this extraordinary situation, and I’m honestly stymied. Even considering the obvious context – disapproval of prostitution as a matter of principle – I can’t think of another sector in which the “solution” would involve the wholesale rejection of labour rights for those involved. I cut my political teeth in anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigning, and I don’t recall anything remotely comparable to this. We may have wanted to decommission the bases and power plants but we never said labour law shouldn’t apply to people working at them.

Nor can ICTU’s position be justified on the basis that sex work isn’t really a choice. The term “work” may be deemed inappropriate for actual forced labour, the labour of someone who is literally enslaved – but ICTU, like all but the most fanatical fringes of the anti-sex work movement, don’t seem to think that most in the sex trade fall into this category. Instead, their submission refers to the “poverty, past history of abuse or limited life choices” that push people into prostitution. But ICTU don’t see it as “not work” when poverty and limited options push people into unappealing jobs outside the sex sector – and they would never dream of opposing legislation to give those workers labour rights.

In some respects, this betrayal isn’t really a surprise: the Irish trade union movement has a long history of selling out Irish workers, especially those at the margins. (They also have a history of an undemocratic, top-down style of leadership which seems to be reflected here as well: nobody I know in any of the ICTU-affiliated unions was asked for their opinion of this submission before it went in.) But summarily excluding a whole sector of the economy from their remit, and refusing to defend the labour rights of the (particularly vulnerable) people dependent on it? That’s a new low for them, and it’s a shocking one.