Keep The 8th Amendment  – Letter by Rena Haverty to Midland Tribune, reproduced by permission.

We all deserve to live in a country that values and protects human rights. For me,

that means holding on to the 8th Amendment.

Normally referendums are held to insert human rights into our Constitution. But a

referendum to repeal the 8th would do the opposite – if passed, it would remove the

basic human right of unborn children, their right to life. It would discriminate against

them and make them second class citizens in our country. It would do all of this

because it would mean that their lives could be ended through abortion, something

which is not allowed for any other group of humans in our country.

I don’t believe that unborn children should be discriminated against in this way,

especially not when you consider that abortion is not necessary to save women’s

lives. Doctors in Ireland have an excellent record when it comes to protecting

women in pregnancy, far better than many other countries where abortion is legal.

And we don’t allow the kinds of abuses that abortion inevitably leads to.

I’m thinking about abuses like those that happen in England and Wales, where

babies who survived abortions were left to die alone in hospital corners, deprived of

medical attention because they were destined to die in the abortion procedure. Or

the other great abuse caused by abortion in England, where 90% of babies

diagnosed with Down’s syndrome are aborted. No-one intended those kinds of

abuses when abortion was introduced to England in 1967 on supposedly “restrictive

grounds”. But today abortion is available up to birth if a baby is diagnosed with a

I’m going along to the Pro Life Campaign “Celebrate the 8th ” event on Saturday, June

4th in Molesworth Street to hear two speakers who will address these abuses.

Melissa Ohden is going to tell her story about how she survived an abortion and was

only saved when a medic decided to give her medical treatment instead of

abandoning her to her fate. And Heidi Crowter is a disability rights activist who is

going to talk about why we need a life-saving provision like the 8th Amendment to

protect every human being in Ireland.

It’s so easy to blame the 8th Amendment for things that go wrong in this country even

when those things have nothing to with our abortion laws. But we don’t hear

enough from the individuals who say that this provision has saved their lives, or from

families who say that if it wasn’t for the 8th Amendment, they would have been

pressured to abort their baby because of his or her disability. I want to hear those

stories. I want a proper debate that looks at all of the good influences that the 8th has

had on Irish society. That’s why I’m going along on June 4th to hear from ordinary

people about why we need to keep the 8th Amendment and celebrate the lives that it has saved.