Ireland is scornful of its girl children. The state can and does oppose what a family/a woman/a pregnant person believes is in their best interest. A born girl has no more rights than an unborn foetal one. Within this ongoing patriarchy, there is a belief, even in cases like these, that someone who ends up pregnant has somehow colluded in the outcome. That they brought it on themselves. There is only sympathy for that which cannot survive outside a woman’s body.
It is May 2018 and one week before the referendum. Everyone is preoccupied and weary. Dublin feels brittle and on edge. I chair a literary panel in County Longford, and the town is dominated by No posters. The only two Yes ones I see have been defaced. The referendum is not far from any waking thought. Every woman I know cannot sleep. Some confess to jags of spontaneous crying. A relative admits they’re voting No, and it feels like a betrayal. We have a long phone conversation, at the end of which they say they’ve changed their mind. A writer friend overhears a group of twenty-something men talking on a train. One, full of swagger, says he doesn’t ‘want to give them that’, insinuating that women are uppity and asking for too much for wanting to control their bodies. But there are other men too: kind, compassionate ones. The canvass and leaflet drops are full of them, standing alongside us, recognizing what’s at stake. We all will it to be 26 May, with the ballot boxes tallied and Ireland finally admitting that the law needs to change.
In 2012, thirty-one-year-old Savita Halappanavar died in Galway after complications arising from a septic miscarriage. The tragic details of the story itself – her youth, her swift decline – shocked everyone. When she pleaded for a termination that would have saved her life, a midwife told her it wasn’t possible because ‘this is a Catholic country’. Her death was cruel and preventable. It was also a turning point, changing the minds of many who previously wouldn’t have considered themselves pro-choice. It prompted protests and galvanised thousands to push on for reform of the constitution. Savita’s name is on everyone’s lips in 2018. Her parents urge the country to vote Yes.
As the referendum draws nearer, other healthcare stories begin to emerge. One surfaces about women who underwent routine smear tests under the national CervicalCheck programme. It is thought that over two hundred women were wrongly given the all-clear and seventeen have died. How can we ever think that Irish women’s bodies are not ultimately political? A week after the referendum, Irish President Michael D. Higgins invites busloads of women to Áras an Uachtaráin (his presidential home). Women who were survivors of the Magdalene laundries. Imprisoned by the state and religious orders, made to work without pay, shamed for being pregnant, ‘fallen’ or promiscuous. The history of subjugation for Irish women is a long and complex one, connected to both past and present – the weight of this history bears down hugely on the 2018 referendum.
On the night that the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act was passed in 2013, I watched the vote inside the Dáil, the lower house of the national parliament. The act allowed for abortion where pregnancy endangers a woman’s life, including the risk of suicide, but contained several strict criteria in order for a termination to proceed. On the way in to Leinster House, I passed a large crowd of anti-choice protestors. Strikingly, many were teenage girls and young women. The very girls who may find themselves squinting at a pregnancy test with a palpitating heart. If their Catholicism is fervent and absolute – abstinence until marriage, no contraception – what would they do if they found themselves with an unplanned pregnancy, whatever the reason? In 2018, post-referendum, I think about those girls, bellowing outside government buildings in their ‘Abortion stops a beating heart’ T-shirts. Do they still abhor the idea of termination? Would they dutifully persevere with an unwanted pregnancy, even though the law has changed? The groups they represent have always argued that the issue is a moral or religious one. That God and good morality are reasons to forcibly birth a new person. The issue is never seen as being wholly about healthcare, and whenever the anti-choice campaign talks about pregnancies and foetuses, the weight of discussion tips towards the unborn, not to a woman’s health. Her body is secondary.
There is always the historical argument. That Ireland was a very different place in the past, even though the Eighth Amendment was only introduced a quarter of a century ago, a reach-out-and-touch-it amount of time. The years either side of it saw teenager Ann Lovett dying at a grotto while giving birth; Eileen Flynn sacked from a teaching job because she was pregnant by – but not married to – the father; and the Kerry Babies case, which accused Joanne Hayes of murdering her stillborn child (partly because she was also unmarried). To copper fasten this fear of women, and to resolutely keep them in check, our constitution still contains a clause, Article 41.2.1, about the place of women in the home. (‘The State recognises that by her life within the home, a woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’, and ‘The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.’ There is talk of a referendum to remove it.) History can be blamed for cumulative acts, but in inching forward it is taken for granted that this movement will be towards progress. Towards more democratic ends, more socially liberal ideas, which have traditionally advanced the cause of women’s lives. Ireland has changed – and is changing – but this does not undo the damage and trauma that has been inflicted on women.
In spring 2018 I drive my children to school and they ask about the No posters that hang on every lamppost. About why people are talking about murdering babies. My children – who are young enough that they still haven’t asked where babies actually come from – should not have to see these disturbing images. I’m caught between the grimness of the conversation and not wanting to condescend. I explain about the lies on the posters, about how sad and complicated it is for women. I explain that this vote is about choice and health, and not making decisions for other people. My daughter makes a sign to hang in our front window: If you’re voting No, go away! At a local family day in a park, my son encounters a man who is handing out No badges and tells him that he should be voting Yes instead. My children, who were once foetal images on a screen, are now full of opinions and questions. Although this is all complex, they are listening and they understand.
The many legal cases that have been taken in the name of abortion add up. X, C, D, another D, A, B, Y, NP. We have turned women into letters. This has been done as a measure of privacy, especially as some are minors, but it is also an act of erasure. Women alphabetised and, as a result, anonymised. It is easier for those opposed to the wishes of these women to negate them if the reality of their lives is represented merely as a letter. X, C and Miss D were minors – all victims of rape – and the cases were heard in camera. D was a woman carrying a foetus with a fatal abnormality. Ms Y was an asylum seeker raped in her home country. When she was refused an abortion, and told her pregnancy was too advanced, she went on hunger strike. The baby was forcibly delivered by C-section at twenty-five weeks. The woman, who later took an action for trespass, negligence, and assault and battery, was treated as an incubator. NP, a pregnant mother of young children, suffered a massive neural injury and was kept alive on life support against her family’s wishes. The hospital, fearful of breaching the constitution, felt they had no option but to keep her alive artificially until the foetus was delivered. Her parents and partner disagreed, and the story played out in the news, with gruesome and distressing detail about her physical condition. Women who didn’t – or couldn’t – offer consent to their situations were treated as grotesque growth pods. A Gileadian Handmaid’s Tale from which Irish women couldn’t seem to wake. To talk about the body in Ireland, to write of it, is to confront this theft of autonomy. To examine who controls it, or has the right to it, and why there is no comparable legislation that affects men.
Two days after my first canvass, I go to the oncology ward of a large Dublin hospital for a regular check-up, to
ensure that my past leukaemia has not returned. I sit in front of my consultant and ask if he remembers how there was a birth control mishap during my treatment. As well as being possessed of life-saving qualities, the main drug I took at the time came with warnings that it caused severe foetal damage. My consultant, a kind, smart man who has all the warmth lacking in many doctors I’ve encountered, listened with concern back then, and prescribed a morning-after pill for my predicament. I ask him today if he remembers what he said to me, when, ill and fearful, I questioned what would have happened if the pill didn’t work and I found out I was pregnant. Fifteen years later, he recalls his exact words, without missing a beat: ‘Well, we’d have a conversation.’ I wonder if this is due to the complexity of my case, or because he’s had this ‘conversation’ with so many of his female patients?
I know that the law back then was impossible to navigate. That for a cancer patient, recovery – not pregnancy – is the priority. His hands were completely tied by the reality of the legislation, even though we both knew that being pregnant was only marginally worse for my health than being dead. I don’t like to think about the ‘what if’ for too long. To consider whether I’d have been well enough to make the trip to London or Liverpool. Or if the law would have forbidden me to travel, and concluded that my treatment should have stopped, to protect the pregnancy, with fatal consequences for me.
Reproductive health is about autonomy, agency, choice and being heard. It is also about money, class, access and privilege. Ireland’s history – for women – is the history of our bodies. The goal for the future, at its most basic and unprepossessing, is equality, respect, reproductive control and equal pay. Change has been hard won. It has been set in motion because of women who speak up, protest, march, lobby and put themselves out there. Shifting their stories from private spaces to public spotlights. On polling day, I think of all those women as I walk to cast my vote with my children. It is hot, the sun benevolent, and I try not to assume that this is pathetic fallacy. Outside I take a photograph of my daughter beside the polling station sign, her body showing its own traces of change. I want to record this moment in the hope that this is the last day that her reproductive rights will be out of her control. The sun catches her hair, and I see all the ways her life will be different. She takes my hand, and we walk into the cool air of the hall, to change the future.
Second Mother
They say it started with blackouts. Falling like a felled tree in unforested places. Several times, outside the strip of shops she lives near. The locals all know her, so whenever it happens, they run to my brother’s house and hammer at his door.
‘She’s had a fall.’
And there she is, all four feet eleven inches, prone on the ground. In her portable shopping cart we find packets of biscuits and a day-old dinner still on the plate, vegetables congealing while we wait for the ambulance.
It’s fortunate that this happened in public. If she’d been at home, it could have been in the shower, or on the stairs. Crumpled on the floor by her single bed, unfound. But it’s not actually lucky at all. She’s done all the right things: worked until retirement, voraciously ploughed through books, squinted at word-search puzzles under her bedside lamp. The stats ensnared her. Ushered her in, and she sat, docile, not comprehending what was happening. Memories became segregated from the parts of her that occasionally still note the time, or recognise a famous face in the newspapers we bring. The neural path between her eyes and brain is now choked with weeds.
The blackouts weren’t the start of it. We know that. There’s a different kind of blackness in her brain, one that started with circular conversations, asking the barest number of sociable questions. Enough to be polite. As she sat at our kitchen table for dinner over the weeks, I saw her moving away from us. A grainy facsimile of who she used to be. My children are always patient when she asks, ‘Were you in school today?’ Sometimes it’s the sixth time in half an hour. Sometimes it is Saturday.
No one has an auntie like Terry. This is often said, without resentment, by my other aunts. They all recognise the goodness in her. When I tell people about her, I often say that she is my second mother. She’s my godmother too. My middle name is her name, and I gave it to my daughter as her middle name.
Terry did all the things you’re meant to do with kids who adore you – bake, cook, paint, craft. She indulged my random fashion phases with nuanced, well-chosen clothes and accessories. My first books were gifts from her: faux-leather hardbacks and abridged versions of the classics. Later, we’d scour second-hand shops together for copies of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. I don’t say it lightly, but she is the reason I’m a reader and a writer. Her constant, gentle nudges towards the written word are an unrepayable debt.
Her tininess is distinctive. Compact, but fierce. She wears Scholl shoes (size three) and sheer scarves. On nights out she favours wrap dresses with high heels, bringing her in over the five-foot mark. Frosted pink lipsticks, a shimmer of powder over her freckles. Her tipple is always white wine, or vodka and 7 Up. Or it used to be. The conflict of tenses, of trying not to talk about her in the past tense. The dresses are packed away. She wears fleeces and slippers now. Her hair is longer than it’s ever been. Blue eyes curtained by the glassy sheen of age.
When she’s had her fourth, fifth, maybe sixth fall on the street, an ambulance brings her to hospital. Soon, the Irish healthcare system needs her bed for someone else and she is moved to a dementia ward in a Dickensian building. On the patient whiteboard I spot the name of a prominent poet, but don’t ever see him. People disappear here, into themselves, into the dado-railed wards and lightless corners.
Across from my aunt is a woman who shouts in urgent, iambic bursts. She sidles up to me and hisses, ‘Don’t talk to her! She wants to tell everyone your business!’ Another patient carries a doll everywhere, stroking its hair, while her husband sits at her bedside. These women, with children of their own, with lives and achievements behind them, would not recognise themselves as they are now.
I fear losing my mind more than I do dying. I’d take a shark attack and falling from a height and being stabbed before I’d take my mind being hijacked and replaced with clouds. I would take another round of cancer over untreatable dementia. The toxic silt of chemotherapy sludging through veins. I’d take that over my family watching my personality, my memory, me drift – unreachable – to the bottom of some sea. Anchored in the dark, the weight of all that water. Memory punctured, slowly deflating. Where did you go?
There were busy decades in her life before all of this. Before illness stole her from us. In the 1950s there were factories for working-class Crumlin teenagers, which threw open their doors to girls like Terry who left school at fourteen. Cosmetics makers and confectioners; clothing companies with rows of young girls hunched over sewing machines. Terry worked for all of them. Her father joined other Irish emigrants catching the boat to Holyhead, and was gone for years. In her early twenties, her mother died – my father was just eleven. As the only girl in the family, the role of primary caregiver fell to her. No matter that she had a full-time job and a life to lead.
Generations of women have, by virtue of their gender, been made accidental matriarchs, even if they’ve never given birth. A kind of motherhood was thrust upon Terry – caring for younger siblings and elderly relatives. Because she was a woman she was presumed to be a de facto carer: a sheet-washer and bed-changer. Another of the red-tape hecklers who argue with local authorities about medical grants; a chauffeur to hospital appointments. For these women, there must be a ceding of something. Life must be pared back, but what to give up? Love, art or independence?
It’s also more likely for women than men to lose their memory in old age. Most people use the terms ‘dementia’ and ‘Alzheimer’s’ interchangeably, according to a doctor I ask, but Alzheimer’s accounts for only 50–75 per cent of all dementia cases. ‘There is no narrower figure than that 25 per cent range,’ he says – it’s a hard disease to diag
nose.
There are theories, but no definitive reasons why women are more affected. Researchers at Stanford University believe that carrying a copy of the ApoE4 gene increases the risk for women because of how it interacts with oestrogen. It’s a sort of hormonal fait accompli. Another basic, uncomplicated factor is age and life expectancy. Women live longer than men, and are overtaken by Alzheimer’s.
A nurse tells me about another gender impact. Women, so often the default carers, are more likely to nurse their relatives at home until they can’t cope. Men, especially those of today’s elderly generation, weren’t raised as carers or cooks. They don’t know how to look after their wives so they sign them into nursing homes as soon as the illness progresses.
How do we know when it starts? How to differentiate dementia from climbing the stairs to retrieve something, but being unable to remember what? Do we declare an onset of Alzheimer’s after forgetting a famous face (you know, what’s his name?). It’s a dim boundary, but at some point our neurons struggle to regroup. The cortex and hippocampus are irrevocably changed. In memory loss, there is already death. Cells die and each one is a divesting of some part of the past. The cortex shrinks where the cells used to be. The spaces in between expand. Islands in the sea of the mind. An archipelago of the former self.
Terry never married, and there were never, in my lifetime, any partners. I think this is a situation she was content with, but I can’t be certain. She didn’t resemble the societal caricatures of women like her. The maiden aunt, or spinster, living a Lolly Willowes life. Her friends were her social lifeline, and they took pilgrimages to Knock together, organised by the local church. Holy water bottles filled with vodka, giggling on the coach home. She worked for a big drinks company and there was always booze in her house, even though she was a late convert to alcohol. I visited her regularly in my late teens and sometimes we’d sip wine by the fire, or out in the garden in summer. I’d try to spool back through her life, testing the ice of what I could ask about. There were some men, tentative dates, but ‘They always annoyed me,’ she laughed. Our closeness was a comfortable one, without judgement, and as we talked, it became clear that she had never been physical with anyone. We didn’t make it as far as whether she regretted this, but I absorbed it. When I think of it, even now, I feel it like a shove, her loneliness.
Constellations Page 16