Fighting for an Alternative - An Interview with Goretti Horgan on the feminist/pro-choice struggle in Ireland (Part 1)
By Samantha O’Brien
From our inception, a key focus of Rupture has been making the history of socialist struggle in Ireland widely accessible. As part of this, we have published interviews with key activists, notably our interview with Laurence Cox on the history of environmentalism in Ireland published in issues 6 and 7. Continuing this focus, in this issue Samantha O’Brien interviews Goretti Horgan on past struggles around abortion North and South. Goretti Horgan is a long-standing Derry-based socialist and People Before Profit activist, trade unionist, campaigner around women’s rights, and lecturer in Social Policy in Ulster University, who has been active in the pro-choice movement and many other struggles for decades. This interview will be published in two parts. The second part will be in issue 10.
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Can you give our readers a background on your life; when and why you started to get involved in activism?
My mother was involved in the Irish Housewives’ Association, which doesn't sound very left-wing, but they actually campaigned for contraception in the sixties. I wouldn't have been encouraged by my mother to be involved in the campaign, but I wasn't discouraged. I also worked in England in my twenties and became involved in the campaign against the Corrie bill (an unsuccessful anti-abortion bill introduced to the House of Commons by Scottish Tory MP John Corrie in 1979), so that was really the start of my activism which was almost accidental. I didn't realise until I got involved in the Corrie bill that women from Ireland went to England for abortions. I realised it was a big injustice that they had to travel, and it would be very expensive, but I also thought, “Why don't more people know that it is an option, and why does nobody in Ireland talk about abortion?” So, I came back to Ireland thinking we needed to set up a campaign in feminist activism, and I thought I'd go back and find out what there is. I knew about the Contraception Action Programme, so I contacted them to see if anybody was interested in campaigning around abortion. They put me in touch with Mary Gordon, one of the founders of the Women's Right to Choose group (WRTCG), and I said “We really need an abortion campaign in Ireland.” She told me the WRTCG had been set up just a few months previously. So that's how I came to be involved. I think because I had the experience of campaigning on Corrie, I had training in speaking at public meetings about abortion and been out on the streets answering the questions in a way that we didn't do in Ireland for years and years and that’s why I was asked to speak sometimes.
You were involved in setting up the first pro-choice groups in Ireland. Can you tell us more about that and the political terrain at the time?
The Women's Right to Choose group was very small. There were probably ten or twelve of us, and politically it was extremely mixed. Probably three or four of us would have been involved in socialist groups / identified as revolutionaries. And then there were probably three or four who would have been lefty academics. The others were people who had personal reasons to be involved because of a close friend or a sister who had to travel. That was the makeup of the group. And, as I said, there was not a whole lot of us; it was very much what you call a ‘ginger group.’
The purpose of the group was to get people talking about abortion. Getting the fact out there that there was an alternative to the Mother and Baby homes and that you did not have to necessarily continue a pregnancy if it was going to be a complete disaster for your life as it was for so many women. I think that the idea we might change the law or anything like that was something that was seen as being something way into the future. I know that there's been a concern by some more middle-class people that there wouldn't have been an Eight Amendment if it hadn't been for the Right to Choose group, but history shows that that is actually not true. The Catholic Right were talking about constitutional amendment really soon after the McGee case in the 1970s (a 1973 Irish Supreme Court case which determined that married couples have the constitutional right to make private decisions on family planning).
““The purpose of the group was to get people talking about abortion. Getting the fact out there that there was an alternative to the Mother and Baby homes””
What were the group’s main activities?
There would have been public meetings, student meetings, trying to get in the media as often as possible, writing articles and stuff like that. Then there was also the Irish Pregnancy Counselling Centre. So, the Irish Pregnancy Counselling Centre did actually take a fair bit of energy. These days, everybody talks about Open Door counselling because they took the case to Europe. But Open Door was the successor to the Irish Pregnancy Counselling Centre, which was set up at the start of the 1980s to challenge the law and give women counselling and information about how to get to England to access abortion.
What was your response from people to everything at the time?
It’s interesting there was a lot of support for the Pregnancy Counselling Centre because people could see that people were really desperate; that it was better that they went to England and had a safe abortion than trying to have an unsafe abortion themselves. In the papers, there were a couple of shock, horror-type exposés of it, as you can imagine. In some ways, it kind of helped. In the same way, the Amendment actually helped. The whole referendum and putting the Eight Amendment into the Constitution, in many ways, alerted everybody to the fact that abortion existed and that there were people going to England regularly in their hundreds – at that stage, approaching their thousands. In a way, it spread the word about abortion as a possibility.
The response to the Right to Choose group was mixed. I remember I did a debate on Gay Byrne’s radio show in the morning. The RTE programme was with Loretto Brown from SPUC [the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, a leading anti-abortion group]. People were phoning in, in support of the idea that women needed a choice. It was fairly even. I don't want to exaggerate the challenges we faced because I'm sure you've heard other people saying this about being involved in the Anti-Amendment Campaign and all. It was the time of our lives. We were all very young. I think even those of us who are revolutionaries didn't understand the extent to which we were kind of challenged, almost like the whole substructure of Irish society.
We educated ourselves a lot. We had some great debates of a variety that I'm not sure we always have anymore. I remember spending a lot of time arguing about the importance of the gay community to the Right to Choose movement. Pro-choice people generally were supportive of LGBTQ rights and understood that they were very closely linked. At that stage, we didn't use terms like bodily autonomy. It would have been more like, well, more about sex. More about the right to have a sex life that wasn't linked to reproduction. Coming from England, where the LGBTQ movement was a lot more advanced than it was here, it seemed to me that it was fairly obvious that these groups were natural allies. It would have been about the importance of the right to have a sex life that was separate from reproduction rather than bodily autonomy.
Why do you think people’s attitudes have changed on abortion since the ‘80s?
The big thing is that people have begun to understand that pregnancy is not straightforward. What the Eighth Amendment did for us is to make everybody realise how risky pregnancy can be for the pregnant person. The whole debate around the Eighth Amendment took abortion out of the old selfish arguments of women wanting to fit into their tennis dresses. These days they have these tropes about women fitting into a bikini or going on a foreign holiday. Back then nobody used to go on foreign holidays, back then it was tennis dresses. I think the narrative has moved on from that, from the notion that these are just young, selfish women who couldn't be bothered, to people realising that pregnancy can be risky and that it is also a lifelong responsibility. I do think that has definitely changed.
But of course none of the changes would have come about if it had not been for the combination of the Celtic Tiger, the economic development generally bringing women into the workforce and the collapse of the Church's moral authority. On the one hand, it seems like the Irish ruling class wanted to expand the economy and needed more workers. In order to do that, they brought women into the workforce and had it so that they had no choice but to work. But women have children, yet we have the situation that there's no childcare or no concession at all to the double burden of women. This certainly meant that it was less and less the case that people could just continue with every pregnancy.
Even my own mother in her late eighties said she could not believe the things she told priests in confession, wondered if she was confessing to someone that had abused kids, and questioned everything. It showed the extent of the collapse of the Church's authority. It opened the door to say, “Why are we listening to the Church on this issue or any issue?”
““I think the narrative has moved on from that, from the notion that these are just young, selfish women who couldn’t be bothered””
In my own activism, I remember Youth Defence had loads of anti-choice billboards at train stations. For me, that was kind of the start of something where there were more pro-choice numbers at meetings/protests. Obviously Savita Halappanavar's death was then a catalyst to the mass protests.
I agree with you there. The way I look at it, from the 1980s up until the X Case (a 1992 Irish Supreme Court judgment which established the right of Irish women to an abortion if a pregnant woman's life was at risk), pro-choice activity was mainly reaction. The X Case opened the door, demonstrating that young Ireland wasn't going to accept what old Ireland had been like.
And then, from 1992 to 2002 (when a constitutional amendment to remove the threat of suicide as a grounds for legal abortion was defeated in a referendum), there was an awful lot of talk about abortion and four referendums, or as they tried to push back the X Case. And then, between 2002 and Savita's death, it just seemed like nothing was happening, and nothing was going to happen. But then, from Savita's death to Repeal, everything sped up.
What do you think was the weakness of the Irish left during your activism on this issue?
I joined the Socialist Workers Movement (SWM) in 1981/82. I joined them because they seemed to be the people who took women's liberation more seriously. When I was in England, I was probably more around the International Marxist Group (IMG), which seemed to be much more feminist, but when I came back here, I was around the People's Democracy, the Irish equivalent to the IMG, It sounds awful, but I didn't think they were serious about anything. I would say, "What is your position on this?" Then they would go, "What do you think? Well, that is our position." They hadn't really clearly thought it through, and there were not very many women involved in the organisation or on the left in Ireland. To be honest with you, that was the main weakness at that stage.
The SWM, in the Anti-Amendment Campaign, got many more women into membership, and right through the eighties and nineties, they were really the only people doing serious, sustained work on the left around abortion rights. Some may challenge me on that, but that's what you see if you look at archives of newspapers, journal articles, pamphlets, etc. The pamphlet I wrote in 1982, Why Irish Women Should Have the Right to Choose, was reprinted five times before Savita, so that tells you something about that. So not having enough women involved or groups not going out of their way to involve women, which is necessary, was a weakness.
Article originally published in Issue 9 of Rupture Magazine. Subscribe or purchase previous issues here.