Fighting for an Alternative - An Interview with Goretti Horgan on the feminist/pro-choice struggle in Ireland (Part 2)
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 at Ulster University, who has been active in the pro-choice movement and many other struggles for decades.
This interview is published in two parts. Part 1 was published in issue 9 and on our website.
8. What were the different political tactics you used, and how did they change over time?
That's a very big question over forty years. Our position always would have been that we needed to have as many people as possible involved in campaigning. If you take the Anti-Amendment Campaign, there were a number of different views about how the campaign should have been run. The Right to Choose group kind of split and disappeared over the whole approach to the Anti-Amendment Campaign, although, in the end, we all dissolved ourselves into the Anti-Amendment Campaign. The view of the left in the Anti-Amendment Campaign was that it had to be democratically directed from below and not from the top. The Steering Group of the Anti-Amendment Campaign had three or four people who later became Supreme Court Judges. And then it also had people like me and Marnie Holborough. So, you are talking about a fierce, very broad campaign, and in such a broad campaign, you inevitably have different views about how that should be run.
““In both the Anti-Amendment and Repeal campaigns, you had people at the top who didn’t give kudos to people on the ground doing the groundwork and knowing what arguments would have done best because they were the ones actually putting them on the doors, streets and stalls.””
The Supreme Court Justices types thought they should run it because they knew everything and knew what was best for everybody, and they told us what to do, whereas the left was like - now hang on a second, we need to involve the average Joe and Josephine Soap. We need to have loads of people who can get out on the doors. And make sure that whatever happens, at the end of the referendum that we always kind of knew that we were likely to lose, that there will be a whole cohort of people who are now confident about being able to argue about women's rights, particularly the right to abortion and all that. And what we ended up having was a democratic structure so that there were action groups, and every action group could send two delegates to a bi-monthly delegates conference that was supposed to make all the decisions and stuff like that. But the truth is that most of it kind of came from the top anyway in many ways, a bit like the Together for Yes campaign. On the one hand, we were being told regularly, this is what you should be arguing, this is what you should be doing, and we just went on our own merry way on the ground. In both the Anti-Amendment and Repeal campaigns, you had people at the top who didn’t give kudos to people on the ground doing the groundwork and knowing what arguments would have done best because they were the ones actually putting them on the doors, streets and stalls.
When you mentioned the pills, the pills did actually change everything. And there's no doubt about that, North and South. For the first time, we were able to say to the powers that be that this abortion is happening every day on this island. There was a difference between the North and South, obviously, because, in the South, the ruling class decided that it was just going to turn a blind eye to them and just hope that nobody would kind of notice. Whereas in the North, the prosecutions were frightening, obviously, for the people who were involved, and there was potential for there being a lot more. I spoke at the 2016 March for Choice in Dublin, and I remember I said that the State in the North would come to regret the prosecutions because they enraged so many people, and so they enraged a lot of activists to be even more active. They also dismayed a lot of ordinary folks who kind of thought, whatever you think about abortion, nobody should get locked up for it. So, you could actually see the difference between the Life and Times survey from what people said in 2016 and what they said in 2018. You could see how the prosecutions were much more publicised by 2018, as there was a larger proportion of people in 2018 who were saying that it should be up to the woman herself and nobody should be imprisoned. It should be covered under medical regulation and not criminal law. All of that changed very rapidly, actually, because of the prosecutions and also actions like Ruth Coppinger and Brid Smith holding up the pills and really kind of being defiant about them.
9. Where there any criticisms from activists in the pro-choice movement on the use of abortion pills?
We were in a different position in the North because we were getting abortion pills into the South. The minute you become a service provider, you have to start worrying about service. There was an action in the South, and immediately in the weeks following, there were a lot of seizures of pills coming into the North. We did some investigating, and it became clear that it was just a coincidence that the seizures had happened because, basically, there's about a month every year when British Customs seize all the pills that are coming into the UK. So when it became clear that it was just a coincidence, that this was what had happened, everybody relaxed and stopped worrying about it. We had actions here on abortion pills, but the initial criticism of actions was just that it would have been good to have known in advance because then we could have made sure that there was enough of a supply on the island before the action so that if there were then a period when the pills couldn't come, it wouldn't actually affect the service.
The pills were really important in terms of our activism once people got over the initial issue. Women on the Web started in 2006, and Derry Alliance for Choice started to promote them in 2008, but it wasn't really until the World Health Organization guidelines in 2012 that the movement generally accepted that the pills are something we should be promoting. Like we had some awful rows, but once it became clear that even the World Health Organisation were saying that it was safe to self-manage using the pills, then that was the answer to that. It always seemed to me that they were safer than the alternative because a lot of women couldn't afford to travel.
10. How has the anti-choice opposition changed over time?
It’s funny because I keep getting echoes of stuff from the eighties. Obviously, to some extent, it has changed a lot in some ways because it used to be that the women who had abortions were portrayed as being, like I said earlier, selfish and just wanted to have a good time. More recently, they've gotten clever and now try to imply that they care about women. ‘It's more that we want to stop you from doing this, which will end up with your life ruined, and you'll have breast cancer, infertility and mental health issues. So we're trying to protect you from yourself, really’. That's kind of where they're at these days. But in many ways, though, they haven't changed. First, they still try to demonise pro-choice people and then we've had real experiences. Here in Derry over this last while, we've had some very aggressive anti-choicers turning up outside workshops that we were doing trying to provoke violence, try to provoke some of our people, and we've been very good at ignoring that.
Even the religious stuff, you'd have thought that they would have realised that the island as a whole is far less religious now than it used to be. And yet they're still praying their rosaries outside of the clinics. And in fact, we had a shower here yesterday in Derry, the men's rosary, who go around the place and they have a statue of the Virgin which they put down in a public place and start saying the rosary facing the statue of the Virgin. It's kind of intimidating, like having forty men all there do this and basically praying for the likes of you and me because they think we're going to hell. There's something almost like the Proud Boys about them, do you know what I mean? Because they're praying, you're not supposed to criticise them, but they are literally praying that people like us no longer exist. I'm happy to say that I think they alienate more people than they attract. So, yeah, I see an awful lot of their tactics being very similar. Obviously, technology has moved on, so now they're able to have those huge posters blown up 200 or 300 times. The crowd who used to be outside of Holles Street who call themselves Abolish Abortion Now(they used to be the Institute for Bioethical Research) use technology to have images two hundred or three hundred times, that they weren't able to do back then. Apart from that, I don't think there's all that much of a difference, really
11. What are the key lessons from the abortion struggles North and South?
““There is a key lesson; there will always be people who want to roll back on any advance.””
There is a key lesson; there will always be people who want to roll back on any advance. Even after the X case, when the only advance was that a woman's mental and physical health should be taken into account, that suicide should be like a reason that your life might be in danger; they spent ten years trying to roll that back, a full ten years. There were two separate referendums where they tried to push that right back. In every single advance, we have to fight to keep it. That will be one lesson. But the other lesson is about the fact that class society is set up in such a way that working-class women are always going to be damned if they do and damned if they don't in relation to pregnancy and childbirth. On the one hand, we're supposed to continue every pregnancy and not have abortions, but on the other hand, we're given virtually no help at all to bring up the next generation.
Here in the North, that's even clear where we have a two-child limit. It's been the case that any child born since April 2017 who was a third or subsequent child in a family will not be getting a penny towards their upkeep, no tax credits. If the parents are working and getting tax credits for the other kids, they won't get tax credits for the third or subsequent child. Instead of living on benefits, they won't get benefits for the third or subsequent child. That's an extreme example of it. But obviously, the lack of childcare, the lack of real free education and the difficulties that everybody has accessing decent health care in a timely manner, and housing are denied to working-class women in class society. I suppose that kind of the biggest lesson is that we won't get justice, a society that's child-centred or women-centred if we don't change the whole nature of society and when I talk about women, I mean anyone that can become pregnant.
12. What other feminist struggles have you been involved in, less famous than the abortion one?
The minute I moved to Derry, I was involved in trying to get childcare organised here, and I have to say it has been a complete failure. Unlike in Scotland and Wales, which have thirty hours a week of free childcare for three and four-year-olds, we don't have that here. And then obviously workers' rights. The UCD cleaner strike in 1985 was a huge event and went on for months, absolutely months. They were basically one of the first groups of workers that had been transferred from direct employment by UCD to contract cleaners, and they had been assured that they would keep all the terms and conditions and all, but they did not. They were told they would lose their jobs and that the new contractor would have their own workers they would be bringing in. As a result of that strike, something like TUPE (a transfer of undertakings where employees are transferred to another employer as part of a legal merger or sale of the business) was brought into the South. It might be called something different down there. If you are on a contract and working for a public sector organisation and then you are outsourced, you have TUPE, where you keep your terms and conditions.
““by being involved in your union, by doing your best to make your workplace a fighting workplace and your union branch of a fighting branch, that’s actually very important feminist work””
There also used to be a GP-led maternity unit; people having babies did not have to go through a big medical thing going into the hospital. It was almost like a cottage hospital on the site of the main hospital. It was more relaxed, and it was run by midwives. The only doctors that would come in would have been GPs, not obstetricians. We had a brilliant campaign to keep it open and managed to keep it open for a few years. But of course, as soon as the campaign died down, there were new proposals, and eventually, it did close down. This goes back to what I was saying that you always have to fight.
We had to have a campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to get the morning-after pill available. We started finding out which pharmacy did and didn't do the morning-after pill, naming and shaming them. Some pharmacies said they were approached by the anti-abortionists who said they would picket; we said if you don't provide the morning-after pill, we will picket, and there's more of us than there are of them anyway. That actually was something that was successful. And I would have to say that I consider my trade union work to be part of my feminist work because of the fight for a world where women have real equality and where we have reproductive justice. Justice means we can bring our children up in dignity without having to struggle the whole time and all that. That kind of a world is incompatible really with capitalism. So I think that actually by being involved in your union, by doing your best to make your workplace a fighting workplace and your union branch of a fighting branch, that's actually very important feminist work.
13. When you look at the rolling back of abortion rights in the US and the election of a far-right government in Italy with the threat of rolling back abortion rights there, how do we protect our rights in Ireland?
If we are not always trying to push our rights forward the whole time, then the anti-abortionists will take advantage. I keep on saying to friends and comrades in America that we really showed in Ireland in 1992 with the X case that the Supreme Court can say whatever it likes, but if there are enough people on the streets making it very clear that the Supreme Court won't get away with just taking away rights like that we can make a difference, and we did see that when X Case was finally given permission by the Supreme Court to go to England. It's interesting that the Supreme Court justices were unable to provide us with the legal reasoning for why she was allowed to go. They weren't going to say ‘We're afraid of riots on the streets’.
Every time that happens, we have to make sure that we're always ready, that any time that they do anything to push back on our rights, that we immediately make them sorry that they've done that, and that we stay organised. We still have people travelling North and South. We still have people who are forced to continue pregnancies that they don't want to continue. And we still have a situation where there are such people in rural areas who have virtually no access at all, even to early medical abortion, except the websites. And so we know that we need to keep fighting to get a proper setup. I mean, we have a really good law here in the North and one that would solve all of the problems that people have in the South. And I really don't understand why there's not a much clearer campaign in the South to say we want the same as in the North. We have much the same as the South in terms of abortion without restriction up to twelve weeks - but between twelve and twenty-four weeks, abortion is legal if two doctors agree that continuing the pregnancy would be a greater risk to the woman's physical or mental health than terminating it.
It is always the case that it's always safer to have an abortion than to give birth, so it's always the case that it is riskier to continue the pregnancy. Essentially there's abortion on request, really, up until twenty-four weeks. After twenty-four weeks, abortion is legal if there's severe fetal abnormality. Not a fatal foetal abnormality, a severe foetal abnormality, so there's no time limit except the limits that people themselves only. Short of Canada, which would be the ideal situation, the Northern law is actually good. It has none of the stuff that you have in the South with a three-day wait. So, as I say, I don’t understand why people in the South are not saying more that's what we want as a minimum.
14. What do you think are the key demands for a socialist feminist struggle today, both in Ireland and globally?
There is a very good little book called Feminism for the 99% by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser. What all of their demands come down to a fair world where there's reproductive justice. Those words, reproductive justice, came to prominence in America, from women of colour and particularly Sister Song. But actually, it's a concept that socialists have always used when discussing women's rights. We used to talk about a woman's right to choose, and we're always very clear that that didn't just mean the right to choose abortion, but that it also meant to have a real choice when it came to pregnancy; a real choice of being able to have the child and to bring it up in a warm house with enough food, decent childcare, a good education system and a good healthcare system and all those kinds of things. A key demand is to turn the world upside down, and we have to bring a just transition into that. I get really fed up with some of the environmentalists saying that we all have to accept lower living standards. We can't, actually, because some people have no living standard at all; their standard of living is so low. The question isn't one of everybody having lower living standards, it's a question of using the wealth that there is in the world, and there is more wealth now in the world than there ever was before. Redistributing that wealth ensures that everybody has a decent living standard, and that would matter more to women than anybody else because everywhere, it's women who manage poverty.
““it’s really important in the trade unions and in working-class communities that people see just transition as improving their living standards and not actually lowering them””
I remember a guy who then was involved in stepping up the Green Party here in Northern Ireland having an argument with me about disposable nappies when it was fairly new, and like me going well, I'll tell you what, when society gives women the time off, when laundry people are coming to my door that I could just hand them over, then we can talk about disposable nappies.
Also, the carbon footprint of somebody who's living on benefits and on low income generally, their carbon footprint is going to be absolutely tiny compared to probably even yours and mine, and the rich and super-rich. So to say that we all have to do anything in terms of just transition, it's just bullshit. What really annoys me about it is that it makes people think that we're all bloody Fine Gaelers on bikes. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but I think that it's really important in the trade unions and in working-class communities that people see just transition as improving their living standards and not actually lowering them.
Article originally published in Issue 10 of Rupture Magazine. Subscribe or purchase previous issues here.