I wrote the following text in November 2012 to have ready in case a smear campaign directed at the freshly renewed pro-choice movement in Ireland gained any real traction beyound the media stories mentioned below. I didn’t publish it at the time as it failed to get traction and thus this would, at best, have been a distraction from the organising work being done, work that was going to succeed in a few short years in overturning Ireland’s ban on abortion access through the Repeal referendum in May 2018. The smear was built around an email I had sent as rumours of the death of a women having died in a Galway hopital after being denied an abortion spread amongst pro-choice activists and was basically just me proposing we have a meeting to organise a protest if this turned out to be true and the family did not object. My main concern was that the anti-choice activists and their pet journalists would work out who I was and concoct a weird conspiracy story through misrepresenting my long activity as an anarchist in Ireland and elsewhere in a somewhat similar fashion to the way they has used the involvement of individual republicans to smear Shell to Sea a few years previously.
I wrote the following text in November 2012 to have ready in case a smear campaign directed at the freshly renewed pro-choice movement in Ireland gained any real traction beyound the media stories mentioned below. I didn’t publish it at the time as it failed to get traction and thus this would, at best, have been a distraction from the organising work being done, work that was going to succeed in a few short years in overturning Ireland’s ban on abortion access through the Repeal referendum in May 2018. The smear was built around an email I had sent as rumours of the death of a women having died in a Galway hopital after being denied an abortion spread amongst pro-choice activists and was basically just me proposing we have a meeting to organise a protest if this turned out to be true and the family did not object. My main concern was that the anti-choice activists and their pet journalists would work out who I was and concoct a weird conspiracy story through misrepresenting my long activity as an anarchist in Ireland and elsewhere in a somewhat similar fashion to the way they has used the involvement of individual republicans to smear Shell to Sea a few years previously.
I’m publishing it now because essentially we won the fight for abortion access and the smear no longer matters. The time of publication at the end of 2018 is the aftermath of the abortion access legislation being signed into law by the Irish president and perhaps less than 10 days before its first use. This text now now provideds a secondary and unintended purpose of being a useful ‘written at the moment’ account of a key organising moment in the pro-choice struggle that won the holding of a referendum which at the time of writing would have seen impossibly distant. The ICN (Irish Choice Network) referred to in the text held the meetings that founded the Abortion Rights Campaign, the grassroots feminist network that more than any other organisation was responsible for that achievement. It has some value as those doing the organising work seldom have time to write their own accounts and all too often vanish from histories that focus on the role of politicians and others whose roles were minor
I’ve left the text as I wrote it originally apart from adding dates to make it clear which ‘last weekend’ is being referred to, links and explanatory notes between []. It ends rather abruptly, I suspect because after preparing it but only intending to publish if more detailed smears arose I felt I’d enough to quickly edit into a rapid response if required. With other WSM members I’m working on a much longer history of the road to repeal, publishing this means we can link to it from that.
Original 2012 text – Last weekends Sunday Independent (November 18 2012) carried an attempted smear of the pro-choice movement built around an email of mine that the anti-choice group Youth Defence had obtained. I’d first become aware it was in circulation last Thursday evening when just as the Vincent Brown show went on the air all the anti-choice twitter accounts started excitedly posting links to the same article that had been published on anti-choice sites all over the place. This was obviously organised as the one of the anti-choice panel on the show soon raised the existence of the email, spinning the, somewhat ironic in the circumstances line, that it proved some sort of pro-choice conspiracy.
It’s actually quite a strange experience watching some pretty nasty people try and use something you have written to deflect attention for an issue you feel strongly about – and not in a good way. And the tweets didn’t stop, over the next three days the same handful of anti-choice accounts posted the same "Abortion groups in secret plans" tweets over and over again to #Savita and #RIPSavita. Which left me in a tricky situation as out of respect to her family and my fellow pro-choice campaigners (some of whom had been named and were getting harassing emails and phone calls in work as a result) I wasn’t in a position to respond.
It got somewhat farcical on Friday when we heard that both the Sunday Independent and RTE’s Primetime had contacted the people named because they intended to run stories based on this email. We had been ignoring it as a non-story on twitter, it made ‘sense’ for the anti-choice groups to come up with any sort of FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) story they could manufacture, what was bizarre was that two ‘serious’ news outlets appeared to actually intend reporting on it. Now don’t get me wrong both the Sindo and Primetime have a record of running smear stories, some would say the Sunday Independent does little else. But this story was so thin that ‘Really?’ was the only response I could muster when I heard they were trying to find out who the AndrewF whom wrote the email was.
But lets backtrack and put some context on this.
On October 21 some 17 weeks into her pregnancy, Savita Halappanavar was admitted to Galway University Hospital with severe backache. She was miscarrying, her waters had broken and her cerfix was dilated but because the doctors could detect a foetal heartbeat she was told the pregnancy had to continue. She spent three days in agony during which Savita and her husband Praveen repeatedly requested an abortion to end the pregnacy only to be told that this was not possible be because "this is a catholic country." Savita died on October 28th.
Two weeks later I received a message from a couple of friends saying they had heard a rumour that a pregnant women had died in Ireland after having been refused an abortion. I’ve been involved in the struggle for abortion rights in Ireland since the 1980’s. As part of the SPUC v Student struggle then I was handed an injunction by SPUC’s lawyers while distributing copies of the TCD student Union guide book that included a phone number by which women could find out about abortion services in the Britain. They never followed up on my injunction but they did with the officers of the unions that were defying the information ban and a dozen of them ended up being fined 60,000 pounds, enough jn those days to buy a 4 bedroom house.
A couple of years later in 1992 I was still defying the injunction banning the distribution of that phone number on the Saturday that news of the X-case broke, a 14 year old pregnant as result of rape who had been injected by the Irish state to prevent her travelling to Britain for an abortion. Our leafleting was normally greeted with disinterest but that Saturday perhaps one on four or five people stopped to tell us how angry they were. In the pub afterwards I proposed we organise a march for the following Saturday, and we agreed to call a rally (just in case attendance was low). But some 10-15,000 marched and the courts were forces to reinterpret the Irish constitution to allow X to go. In the subsequent referendum the rights to ‘travel and ‘information’ were confirmed despite the opposition of Youth Defence and other so called ‘pro-life’ groups. The court had also ruled that abortion was permissible in certain very limited circumstances, in particular where there was a substantial threat to the woman’s life. The third question in the referendum sought to roll back that judgement and enforce a ban on abortion in all circumstances. The government Youth Defence were defeated on that issue
What should have then happened was the government introducing a bill to legislate for X. If they had there is a good chance Savita Halappanavar would still be alive as depending on the wording of that bill the doctors would have been in a clear position to terminate the pregnancy and save her life without fearing prosecution. But in the 20 years since the X-Case none of the six governments in power brought in such legislation, indeed in 2002 there was a second failed attempt to reverse that ruling by referendum. Worse still the anti-choice movement began a secret campaign of infiltrating the medical council and getting its people into positions of power which means that any doctor performing an abortion would not only fear possible prosecution but also being ‘struck off’ and thus unable to work.
It sounds harsh but I do consider the so called pro-life movement responsible for Savita Halappanavar death. Those who campaigned against the 1983 referendum warned that it would lead to women dying. During the attempt to turn back the X-Case in 1992 and 2002 we chanted ‘Pro-life, that’s a lie, you don’t care if women die’. And when the circumstances of the death of Savita were explained by her husband the so called pro-life movement went into overdrive to try and obscure what had happened and divert people’s attention. The package of tactics they use is what I’ve termed spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) similar tactics to that used by Tobacco companies to delay regulation on cigerattes and by oil companies to delay measures to control globe warning. Te attempt to generate a distracting conspiracy theory around my email is part of this suite of tactics.
In the summer of 2012 I was part of the group of people brought together by a shared outrage of a campaign by the anti-choice group Youth Defence. In an escalation of their obnoxious tactics they had paid to erect hundreds of billboards all over the city aimed at shaming women who had abortions. The context of this was that there was finally going to be a report on the X-Case legislation going to the current government and they wanted to create a climate of fear in which government TD’s would be terrified to act. Their public campaign was accompanied by organising their contacts to repeatedly contact TD’s and by a fake medical conference in the Autumn called so that there could be a final statement released at the end saying that was ‘never’ a need for abortion to save a woman’s life.
This was the context is which I received that message that my friends had heard that a woman had died in just such circumstances. I started making phone calls to other pro-choice activists to see if anyone else had heard such a story, most had heard nothing. But on the 3rd or 4th call I found someone who had not only heard but who had talked to friends of the woman who had died. This had happened after they had contacted the pro-choice organisation she was involved with, we know now that at this point in time Savita’s friends and families had reached out to a couple of pro-choice organisations and well as to the journalist Kitty Holland who would eventually publish the story. But that night all I knew was that something terrible had happened and that the rumour, coming from the friends who had contacted me, was that the story would be published mid-week.
A number of us had been meeting since the Youth Defence poster campaign and had started to discuss the launch of a national pro-choice group. This seems the obvious group to inform of what I had heard and to bring together to discuss how we should respond. The should was very important at this point in time because I now knew the family were not from Ireland and we were very concerned that although it seemed clear they wanted to go public and demand justice that they didn’t realise the extent to which they would then be targeted by a desperate and quite ruthless anti-choice movement. Just that summer we’d seen the way that movement had sought to smear women who wanted abortion in the cases of where there was a diagnosis of lethal foetal abnormalities which meant that once born the baby would quickly or instantly die.
I also knew such organisations used all sorts of underhand methods including surveillance of those who fight for women’s rights and so concern for the families privacy and that worry led me to compose my email in a very cautious manner. There is an old saying that ‘Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you’ and in this case it proved true. The email was ‘got’ and used to try and generate a smear campaign.
Youth Defence and other organisations have had the email for some time and partially quoted it in sensational smear stories. So for the record the entire text sent was as below.
—
Hi all,
as some of you are already aware there are rumors that a major news story related to the denial of abortion access is going to break in the media early this coming week. I don’t want to put anything more in an email for now as the information I have is both fragmentary and complex but I’ve talked to a few other people some of whom had heard similar details.
Because of the complexity of the situation its not obvious how best to proceed so we are calling an emergency meeting of the ICN (if that is what we are called, I’m not quite sure after last Sat) for tomorrow night at 18.00 in Seomra Spraoi ( map at http://seomraspraoi.org/copy_of_contact-us ). We hope by then to have more definite information around which we can make some collective decisions about how best to proceed. Apologies if this is all a little mysterious, but the reason why I didn’t want to put specific details down by email will probably be clear tomorrow.
I’m sending this out to the list of people who received the planning documents for the Saturday meeting and I’ll also post it in the internal forum.
Andrew
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The version of the email they obtained lacked my email address which meant that they only knew that it came from an AndrewF. However they did get the emails of the two women who replied to me and they have both been targeted by anti-choice groups and bigots as a result of their details being published.
We met the following evening and were given a limited report on what Savita’s friends had told the people they had contacted. This was quite limited, to the extent that we were not even told her name at this point in time. Again even though the family and friends were clearly intending to go public we were very, very careful not to make that decision for them and everyone present was told not to repeat any of the details of what was said outside the room. We in fact decided not to respond until the family had gone public and if this had happened by Wednesday evening to attend a protest at the Dail that had already been scheduled by another pro-choice group to demand legislation for the X-case and to take things from there. We agreed that what we called for would largely be determined by what the family were saying but that it made sense to consider the possibility of calling a demonstration on Saturday.
By Tuesday afternoon I’d heard that the story was likely to appear in the Irish Times the following day, in fact it first came up around 11pm that evening on RTE News bulletins and on the Vincent Brown show. This was the first time most of us heard that the women who had died was called Savita Halappanavar or any of the specific medical details of her death. The people who had been in communication with family & friends over the previous week had rightly just informed the small groups who had met in the previous days of only the most general details. It was also the point that I discovered Savita and her husband were from India.
From that first report it became clear that Praveen was determined to seek justice for his dead wife through pushing for the legislation to allow abortion in Irish hospitals so that no other family would suffer in the same way. Myself and another WSM member had spent the previous hour modifying an article that had been written for Workers Solidarity to publish once the media had published the details of the tragedy, As the details emerged we added the specific details and risked stating what we believed had to happen, a march in Dublin that Saturday. (The first version of the article said this would be at 2, once an actual planning meeting happened this was moved to 4. 20 years of inaction on abortion access – now a tragedy)
It was disturbing to watch the anti-choice bigots start their campaign to spread FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) only minutes after the announcements of Savita’s death had been published. It was clear that they hand’t paused to consider the role they had played in creating the legal situation in which she died, they were just rushing in to try and prevent that legal situation being changed.
Through Wednesday morning the Facebook event that advertised the protest grew rapidly from 100 people attending shortly after the news broke to 3,000 by around 4pm. The scene at the Dail gates shortly after 6 was chaotic as thousands of people spread across Kildare street and Molesworth street, bringing traffic to a standstill and leading the Garda on duty to panic. At about quarter to 6 I had overhead a women asking the Garda at the gate if many were expected for the protest, he had shrugged and said he thought there would be a few office workers present. Those of us who remembered the massive spontaneous pouring onto the streets that characterised the X-case and who had been following the Facebook events growth could only wonder.
That demonstration and the demonstrations that followed it felt very like the demonstrations during the x-case. Like those demonstrations there were a small group of people who had done the basic organising for them but they were characterised by huge numbers of people with no connection to the organisers pouring into the streets with their own placards, sad, angry and indeed furious. I’d also witnessed the very different ‘Rally for Life’ that Youth Defence had staged in Belfast over the summer and the difference between that carefully stage managed event with its carefully constructed photographic opportunities could not have been greater.
Afterwards a group of just over 20 met in Buswell’s hotel and planned out the details of Saturday’s demonstration. Most of us knew each other from previous pro-choice protests, some of us for decades but we were by no means a single organisation or even network. We had a single mission though, to make sure the grief & anger about Savita’s death could be visibly expressed that Saturday and the process of making sure no other woman was ever killed by Irish anti abortion laws could be quickly moved forward.
It was 24 hours after this meeting that I saw the first articles based on the leaked email being published by anti-choice organisations. In online discussion we pretty quickly agreed this was a distraction from the work that had to be done to make Saturday a success and was no more than a desperate anti-choice movement thrashing around to find anything to say that didn’t involve admitting that the laws they had pushed for had created the conditions under which Savita had died. If they had any respect or dignity they would have shut up and faded out of public life, instead they rested to trying to concoct smear stories.
The following day we heard that both the Sunday Independent and RTE Primetime had contacted people who had been engaged in the brief email conversation. The bigots were making the bizarre claim that we must have been told by the HSE, a reflection perhaps of how they work, so it was decided to release a very short statement to those two outlets setting this straight. It read "Members of the Indian community got in touch with pro-choice groups following Savita’s death."
This I thought would be the end of it as with the weird HSE conspiracy angle there was no story whatsoever. Pro-Choice group meets after worst fears realised seemed a statement of the expected rather than a story. Saturday was hectic, Seomra Spraoi was abuzz with activity as the volunteer stewards for the march met up for training and discussion as placards were made in another room and huge boxes of candles divided into piles for each steward to distribute in a third. The first of us headed down to Parnell square some 15 minutes before the advertised start time, there were already about 200 people present.
Over the next 30 minutes the number of people pouring up O’Connell street to Parnell Square threatened to swamp the thrown together organisation. The small plaza outside the Garden of Rememberence quickly overflowed, one side of the road was blocked right down to the Ambassador by a throng of people and the other side also started to clog up, threatening the leave the ‘Never Again’ banner that had been made for the march stranded up at the top of the road. But the stewards managed to get enough people to move up the road and enough of the balance to move aside to get the banner through to the front.
A heavy rain shower arrived as the march set off. I was on photography duty and as the shower hit at dusk they meant a rapid change of camera lenses to try and deal with the plummeting light levels. It took the march maybe 30 minutes to pass my vantage point at the O’Connell monument before I sprinted alongside it
Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter)
Appendix; Life Institute PR
This text was on the website of the anti-choice Life Institute until May of 2018, i.e. it was removed shortly before the refendum itself, possibly as a batch deletion of all their older press releases. I’ve obscured the other people named so a google search for their names doesn’t bring you to this page. The original location was http://www.thelifeinstitute.net/news/press-releases/pr-abortion-campaigners-planned-to-import-pills/
Life Institute – PRESS RELEASE
Email leak shows abortion campaigners planned to import abortion pills
24 OCTOBER 2014
Abortion campaigners, including two political researchers in Leinster House, along with the Chair of Labour Women and a member of the board of the Irish Family Planning Association, were part of a Google discussion group which opened a thread discussing illegally importing abortion pills to force a change in the law.
The Google group had left their discussion open and their conversations were being followed by the Life Institute, who noted that the emails confirmed that importing abortion pills illegally had been under discussion by abortion supporters for some time.
Member Andrew F wrote that: "The scope for direct action on the provision of abortion itself has been massively expanded with the arrival of RU484 (sic) and similar pills," and added that this provision should become the primary focus of pro-choice activists, saying that it would be an "open, and by necessity, illegal provision of medical abortion in the Republic."
He argued that this would make a ban on abortion unenforceable and cause the law to be changed.
An Abortion Rights Campaign spokeswoman replied to Andrew F saying: "I think it sounds like an interesting and potentially great idea" and added that political lobbying and the distribution of abortion pills need not be exclusive.
Niamh Uí Bhriain of the Life Institute said that it was "horrendous" that campaigners would endanger women’s lives to push a political agenda. "We’ve heard medical experts such as Dr Sam Coulter Smith and others warn that if women administer these drugs at the wrong dose and at the wrong intervals or by the wrong route then there are very serious risks to women’s health," she said.
"What we’re seeing from custom seizures is that a small number of people – only 24 in 2013 and only 60 this year so far – are importing a large number of abortion pills. Clearly most of the pills are being imported to sell or distribute. Is it the case that abortion campaigners are now putting the ideas outlined in this Google group into action and illegally importing pills to challenge the law?" she asked
"That would show a simply shocking disregard for the safety of women," she said. "The absolute lack of compassion for the baby in the pregnancy is, sadly, not remotely surprising at this stage."
Ms Uí Bhriain said that the Life Institute had come across the emails in late 2012 but that, given the emergence of new evidence as to the importation of abortion pills, the emails were now going to be handed to the Gardai.
Amongst those who took part in this and other discussions in the Irish Choice Network (ICN) were Cxxx Bxxx of the Abortion Right Campaign;Sxxx Axxx of Labour Women; Axxx Dxxx who said she was a board member of the Irish Family Planning Association; Sxxx Lxxx, then a political advisor to Sinn Féin; and Axxx Sxxx then a political researcher for Mick Wallace TD.
We have attached a sample of three screen shots of the google group discussion, further evidence can be forwarded on request.
End