A Woman to Blame

by Nell McCafferty

  If she could find them.

  They were still not legally on sale in the country. A handful of voluntary family-planning clinics, located in the big cities, walked a legal tightrope by making them available in exchange for ‘donations’. Charlie Haughey moved to put some semblance of order on this farce in 1979, when, as Fianna Fáil minister for health, he introduced a Family Planning Act which provided for the sale and distribution of contraceptive devices to married couples only. Advertisement and promotion of them was still banned. A conscience clause which he inserted into his act ensured that doctors and pharmacists would fulfil the role of moral policemen: if the consciences of these mainly male, mainly Catholic practitioners forbade them to prescribe or fill prescriptions for contraceptives, married supplicants would have to go elsewhere. The doctors in turn patrolled the pharmacists, who could not sell even non-medical devices such as the condom without a prescription.

  These men rose with relish to the challenge of patrolling women’s wombs, accepted the act without demur and brought their consciences to bear, with venom, upon them. There was widespread refusal to prescribe or fill a prescription, and many of those doctors who could bring themselves to accede to a married woman’s plea placed further obstacles in her way by refusing to signal the elasticity of his conscience in advance. She had to interpret an elaborate code.

  The Kingdom of Kerry provided an outstanding example of these moral policemen. In the county capital, Tralee, where the women’s group still finds it impossible to confirm how many of the town’s eight doctors approve of contraceptive practice, a young doctor has hung two posters on his waiting-room wall. One of these advertises the Billings method of natural birth control for married couples, the other gives the name and address of a faraway unmarried mother’s home, where the single woman may give birth in secrecy to a child which the state officially deems illegitimate.

  This doctor, waiting behind closed doors in his surgery beyond, hopes that the women who read his posters will infer that he is not averse to the idea of them seeking to determine, within marriage, the number and spacing of their children. If they should further infer that he might see his way to allow them to do so by use of artificial means of contraception, and ask him outright about this in his surgery, he will grant their request. He never, he says, initiates the conversation. However, he will not prescribe the intra-uterine device, which he holds to be an abortifacient.

  Guess again, missus, and we’ll see what we can do for you.

  The Family Planning Act conscience clause which allows the every whim of these men to hold sway does not dictate obeisance to catholicism. One village doctor in Kerry boasts that he will prescribe the pill, irrespective of age or marital status, to ‘mentally defective women’ and even to married women who ‘have children annually by irresponsible husbands’, though not to women impregnated annually if, in his opinion, the husbands are responsible.

  The woman who successfully negotiates with such a Kerry doctor must then find a Kerry pharmacist. Most will handle prescriptions for the pill. The explanation given by one of them is illuminating. The pill, he said, has always been acceptable in law and christian theology as a cycle regulator, and it is not for him to presume that the woman seeking it is motivated by any desire other than that of regulating her menstrual flow.

  Ten of the twelve pharmacies in Tralee refuse to stock condoms, as do five of the six in Listowel, five of the six in Killarney and the sole chemist in Cahirciveen.

  The consciences of even these men are patrolled by another set of moral policemen. Customs officials in neighbouring County Cork, who monitor the air approaches to the west, impounded forty-eight condoms which a protestant Kerry doctor tried to import by post from England for his own personal use. The official letter notifying him of seizure of his contraband stated that such articles in such quantity must be imported personally and a satisfactory verbal explanation supplied as to their intended use, to safeguard against illegal sale. The doctor’s wife became pregnant during the dispute.

  The ultimate moral policing of the Kingdom of Kerry was conducted by the roman catholic church, under its then bishop, Kevin McNamara, whose sermons were often carried verbatim in the county’s biggest local newspaper, The Kerryman. His exhortations to his flock were as simple as they were austere. The use of artificial methods of contraception were sinful, and married couples for whom the natural methods were unsuitable should, he said, refrain from sexual relations. ‘Sexual activity outside marriage is a serious sin’, he proclaimed in his lenten pastoral in 1983. ‘It is necessary to call things once again by their true names – fornication, adultery, lustful desires, immoral displays in cinemas, videos and etcetera.’ He called for ‘reverence for parental authority, self-denial and discipline for the young’ and stressed the ‘essential role of the wife and mother in the home’.

  He had a restrictive view of her role. ‘Is she prudent and economic in the management of her home? Is she loving and supportive of her husband as she ought to be? Does she do her best, according to her resources, to provide wholesome and appetising meals? Does she give enough time to her children, or to the contrary, does she absent herself from the home to a degree that is unnecessary and harmful?’

  He exhorted fathers and husbands to drink much less. That was all he asked of them, that they drink much less.

  To the young unmarried he recommended ‘Chastity; avoid the sins of impurity; be present to another human being in a friendly, open and generous spirit, sharing thoughts and feelings with joy and gratitude and full respect for the dignity of oneself and others, as members of Christ’s Body and Temples of the Holy Spirit.’

  Father Joseph Nolan of Kilflynn, who normally delivers the sermon at Sunday mass in neighbouring Abbeydorney, had a further recommendation for those unmarried young who failed to observe the church’s strictures on chastity. The use of contraception by them, he said in a television interview, compounded the seriousness of the sin because it indicated full knowledge and intention to sin before the sin was committed.

  It was a brave and confident and informed woman, and one who was willing moreover to disregard the teachings of her church, who could beat her way through this thicket to the safe haven where the protection of birth control was available.

  A Tralee woman in her twenties with third-level education in another part of the country behind her went, after graduation, to her local doctor to renew her prescription for the pill. She was, he knew, due to marry her long-standing fiancé. He refused to fill out the prescription. She had to take the train to Dublin, to a doctor of her acquaintance, to avoid further humiliation.

  She then had to attend a pre-marriage course, to qualify for a catholic church ceremony in Tralee. The young and charismatic priest who lectured her and her companions on the natural methods of family planning gave each of the women a pre-wedding present of a thermometer and a chart so that they could rehearse. Then they had to choose one of six passages from the thoughts of St Paul for the marriage service. She read that wives should be subject to their husbands, and wondered how St Paul’s command could accommodate the ‘mutual discipline and commitment’ required of a couple using the Billings method. The priest thought she was being picky.

  The bishop asked husbands to drink less. The woman stayed on the pill.

  A pregnant colleague simply lied to the priest about her reasons for wanting to marry at short notice, and she and her intended were excused attendance at the pre-marriage course as the priest thought them ‘educated and respectable’. Nothing in her education, even at third level, had opened her mind to contraceptive practice. ‘There’s a lot of talk, but it’s all negative: you don’t, you can’t, you shouldn’t, and taking protective measures is such a conspicuous thing to do.’

  ‘You’d think,’ says Marguerite Egan of the Tralee women’s group, ‘that we were looking for explosives.’

  Sexual relations in the Kingdom acquired an illicit, sometimes gleefully illicit, aura as the people set about s
ubverting the dictates of priest, politician and medical practitioner. The most common means of subversion was via the country’s internal postal system and the country’s only tabloid Sunday paper, whose logo ‘Are you getting it every Sunday?’ is always displayed on page one above a sub-pornographic picture of an almost naked woman. By the simple means of filling in a cut-out coupon and sending it to the recommended address, readers could obtain by return post as many condoms as they wished, no questions asked about age or marital status. It was entirely illegal but the government of the day turned a gratefully blind eye.

  It was not always successful, because other moral police officers were at work, in the person of the village postmistress or postmaster. The package would sometimes arrive steamed open, clumsily resealed and empty, no questions asked, no response expected.

  It is difficult in the confined closely knit communities of rural Ireland to sustain an absolutely private life. A Kerrywoman’s explanation of her nineteen-year-old daughter’s inhibitions about natural bodily functions was illuminating. When the daughter used to go to the crossroads store for sanitary towels the man behind the counter would cheerfully remark ‘It’s your time again’ or ‘Safe for another month anyway.’

  Such affronts to modesty were as nothing compared to what was said in Kerry, and throughout Ireland, as the eighties opened. Despite the constitutional aspirations about the rightful place of Irishwomen, they had begun to take their place in the paid workforce, were asserting their sexual freedom and were paying a painful price in the absence of contraceptive protection. The number of children born outside of marriage had risen from 1,709 in 1970 to 3,723 in 1980. The number of women seeking abortion in England had shot up from 1,421 in 1974 to 3,673 in 1983. A minuscule feminist group started campaigning for the right to abortion in Ireland. Abortion was illegal, the group’s chances of persuading the public to support the aim were remote in the extreme, but fears of a plot to roll in another constitutional Trojan horse were suddenly expressed by an equally minuscule group of eleven gynaecologists and obstetricians.

  The fundamentalist backlash against feminism, which had begun in America when women there won a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, had finally crossed the Atlantic and hit Ireland. We were about to be force-fed a diet of fertilised eggs, embryos and fearsome stories of murder in the womb.

  6. Church and State

  Joanne Hayes’s three pregnancies, conceived between April 1981 and August 1983, occurred at a time of great convulsion in the world that Irishmen ruled. Government changed three times in that period. Each government was dominated by one single issue: abortion. The ‘pro-life amendment campaign’ was launched in June 1981 and continued until its successful climax in September 1983 when article 7 was added to the constitution:

  The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn, and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.

  The campaign received the forceful, full-throated and full-hearted backing of the roman catholic church, which claimed a ninety-five per cent membership among the population of the republic. Its particular champion was Kevin McNamara, bishop of Kerry, who was afterwards promoted by Pope John Paul to the archbishopric of Dublin, the largest catholic diocese in the whole of Europe.

  When the votes were cast to amend the constitution so that abortion would for all time be prohibited in Ireland, Kerry’s ‘pro-life’ vote was fifty per cent higher than that cast countrywide. This was, on its face, a tribute to the people of that county. Kerry is deeply religious and the people desired deeply to be good. Behind them lay a long tradition of obedience to the faith and sacrifice and martyrdom to its cause. There had once been as many monastic settlements in the county as there are today multinational factories. Ireland, on the western edge of Europe, had been the cradle of early Christian civilisation, from the fifth to the eighth century, and within those monasteries a lifestyle was developed which gave Ireland the reputation of a ‘land of saints and scholars’. All the wards in the Kerry county hospital are named after local monasteries. The maternity wards, gynaecological and obstetrical, are called Gallarus, Ardfert and Clonfert. Of Gallarus oratory the poet Seamus Heaney wrote:

  You can still feel the community pack This place: it’s like going into a turfstack, A core of old dark walled up with stone A yard thick. When you’re in it alone You might have dropped, a reduced creature To the heart of the globe. No worshipper Would leap up to his God off this floor.

  Founded there like heroes in a barrow. They sought themselves in the eye of their King Under the black weight of their own breathing. And how he smiled on them as out they came, The sea a censer, and the grass a flame.

  from Door into the Dark (Faber, 1969), p. 22

  Bishop McNamara put his people at the heart of the globe, calling on them to show the way forward once more to a world collapsing under the black weight of murdered babies, which is how he represented abortion. A ‘yes’ vote in the referendum to amend the constitution ‘will be a vote that some unborn children be not put to death, but allowed to be born’, he instructed them. ‘The catholic people will be guided by their church,’ said Denis Foley, their Fianna Fáil representative in the Dáil (parliament).

  Two of the three county newspapers put their full weight behind the campaign. The Kingdom reproduced on its front page a diagram of the foetus at various stages of development, from one-quarter of an inch long at three weeks until twenty-eight weeks, when its eyes opened, accompanied by the warning that ‘social abortion is allowed up to this time in Britain’. The diagram came complete with descriptions of the abortion process. Dilation and curettage required the insertion of a knife ‘to cut the child to pieces’. The suction method ‘crushes’ parts of the baby ‘to death’. The saline injection ‘burns the outer layers of the child’s skin and injects poison’, leaving the baby in the womb to die ‘now or an hour or two later’. With the hysterectomy method, ‘almost all are born alive and most die of exposure’. In Germany, it was asserted, three out of every four babies in the womb were ‘terminated’. It must have seemed, and indeed Bishop Cassidy asserted, that the most dangerous place in the world for a baby was in its mother’s womb. During those years of pregnancy for Joanne Hayes, with government gone out of control and catholic supremacy rampant, women’s sexuality and fertility was a subject of fear, loathing and hypocrisy.

  Kerrymen, saying not a word about contraception, stampeded to the rescue of the eggs which they might have fertilised. The county hosted the inaugural meeting of the Irish Association of Lawyers for the Defence of the Unborn, which stated that ‘the debate is as much about the preservation of a Christian civilisation as it is about the unborn’. A woman, said a supportive editorial in The Kerryman, ‘could now go to a semen bank and select the seed which will give her the perfect child’. Joanne Hayes was then, in February 1983, six months pregnant by Jeremiah Locke, whose wife was also pregnant.

  One of these lawyers, Robert Pierse, was invited to give the sermon at Sunday mass in the north Kerry church of Ballyduff. ‘Country people,’ explained Father John Daly, who vacated the pulpit, ‘need to have quite a lot of things explained to them. They are very busy and don’t have time to read newspapers carefully.’ In a Tralee church, Father Martin Hegarty added a new weekly prayer for Sundays: ‘We pray that all people will recognise and respect the sacredness of life and that the right to life of the unborn child will always be safeguarded in our laws. Lord hear us.’

  In August 1983, The Kerryman reported that ‘The chairmen of all local authorities in Kerry have declared themselves pro-life’. In that month Joanne Hayes became pregnant for a third time by Jeremiah Locke, whose wife was also pregnant again. The Kerry branch of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) declared that the intra-uterine device and the low-oestrogen pill both worked by ‘killing the new human being about one week after conception’. The referen
dum, said Bishop McNamara in that month, was ‘a life-and- death issue’. Both women, however, were to bring Jeremiah Locke’s babies safely out of the womb.

  Fifty of ‘Kerry’s leading sportsmen pledge their support for the pro-life amendment campaign’, announced The Kerryman, and ‘ten of them are all-Ireland captains’. Also included were the rugby international Moss Keane, a cyclist and a golfer.

  Charlie Haughey, who was against contraception for single people then and now, and against abortion for anyone, came to Kerry during the campaign to commemorate the life and death of a party member who had fought with the IRA in the 1916 rising. ‘To this day the daring exploits and brave deeds which he undertook are recounted in song and story and will forever provide a glorious chapter in the story of Kerry’s contribution to the fight to establish a free, independent Irish Republic.’ The man of whom he spoke used to kill people.

  The Kerry branch of the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) called for the resignations of eleven members of the IFA who had expressed opposition to the pro-life campaign, and a Kerry priest congratulated them.

  The Irish Medical Association (IMA) came to Killarney for its annual conference in April 1983 and invited Bishop McNamara to address them at a mass. He warned them against allowing abortion in the ‘hard cases’ of rape, incest and deformity, saying this would open the ‘floodgates’ for the pro-abortionists. No woman need fear death as a direct result of pregnancy because ‘it is indeed one of the great achievements of the Irish medical profession, an achievement one records with pride and satisfaction, to have shown that, with proper care and determination to respect innocent life in every case, it is never necessary, as a means of saving the mother’s life, to take the life of her unborn child’. In Drogheda, on the east coast, Sheila Hodgers and her baby had just died. Radium treatment for the cancer the mother suffered had been ruled out as it would harm the foetus. Her husband used to hear her screams as he crossed the hospital yard. Mother and baby died within hours of the birth, on 19 March 1983.