Foreign influence shapes Ireland’s abortion debate

This is the second in a two-part series about the controversy surrounding the abortion ban in Ireland. The first part, about the growing movement to repeal the ban, can be read here. 

In December 2012, as outrage over the billboards grew, Joseph Scheidler, the national director of the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League, told The Sunday Business Post that American donors gave “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to anti-abortion groups in Ireland. Scheidler — the “patriarch of the anti-abortion movement” in America, as the think tank Political Research Associates put it — singled out Youth Defence as one of the primary recipients. “They need the money for publicity,” he said. “Abortion is about conversion, and it’s very hard to convert people in masses, and that is why people like Youth Defence go out into the street.”

His comments aroused considerable controversy at the time, mostly because they seemed to confirm what abortion rights advocates suspected. Not only would evidence of foreign support mean Youth Defence was not as autonomous as it claimed, but it would also justify scrutiny from the Standards in Public Office Commission, an independent funding watchdog that can impose fines of almost 1,270 euros on nonpolitical individuals or groups for accepting political donations from individuals outside Ireland. (Youth Defence claims it is a human rights organization and “not campaigning for political purposes.” Therefore it maintains that it isn’t required to register with the commission and has consistently declined to do so.)

Today, Scheidler maintains that his comments were spun into “a fiction” by magazines and newspapers. He said that Jim Finnegan, a Catholic anti-abortion activist currently affiliated with Illinois Choose Life, visited Ireland and raised funds in the United States for Irish anti-abortion groups but that those fundraisers “didn’t really take hold.” Finnegan said he visited Ireland for a Youth Defence event in 1995 and then raised “a little over $60,000” for the organization at events in Chicago and Pittsburgh. He said that a second fundraiser, held in 2007, raised an estimated $75,000. “They use it to keep their efforts going,” he said of the money, though he denied that funds were intended for lobbying purposes or billboard campaigns.

Niamh Uí Bhriain, a spokeswoman for the Life Institute, a Youth Defence affiliate, said that allegations of substantial American funding are “just not true” and that Irish people fund Irish projects. “We make our money from people like me — from families with kids, from grannies, from students, from shaking buckets and doing it the hard-slog way,” she said.

She claimed that abortion-rights groups in Ireland have received money from sources such as the Atlantic Philanthropies, a private progressive foundation backed by Irish-American billionaire Charles “Chuck” Feeney. Because of financial support from Atlantic Philanthropies, she believes, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and the National Women’s Council of Ireland have been able to become major campaigners for abortion law reform. (Neither group responded to requests for comment.)

Asked about funding, a representative for Atlantic Philanthropies, which weathered similar accusations of meddling during the Irish same-sex marriage referendum in May, did not respond directly, instead saying, “The total amount of our investments in the Republic of Ireland to date has been upwards of 1.1 billion euros, and this has been in several sectors, including education, health care, aging, children, youth and human rights.”

While the flow of lobbying money may be happening behind closed doors, some foreigners are openly involved in connecting women in Ireland with abortion services. Among them is Mara Clarke, an American who, in 2009, founded the London-based Abortion Support Network to help women from Ireland and Northern Ireland obtain abortions abroad. In 2014 at least 3,735 women — about 10 every day — traveled from Ireland to England or Wales for an abortion, which can cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds, when all expenses are accounted for. In a June report, a U.N. committee described this situation as “discriminatory.”

Clarke first encountered the germ of what would become the Abortion Support Network in 2002 when living in New York City. While reading an article about the difficulties many women face accessing abortion services in the U.S., she learned about the Haven Coalition, a grass-roots organization that offers free accommodation and transportation to women visiting New York for an abortion. She volunteered for the group and began giving up her bed in a one-room apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood to women who needed it. When she moved to London, she learned that a similar organization, the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group, ceased operation in 2001, and she decided to start her own organization, the Abortion Support Network, geared toward marginalized women.

In Ireland numerous interest groups have come out in favor of abortion rights over the past few years, including Atheist Ireland and the Socialist Workers Party. More than two dozen of them formed the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, a lobbying alliance that recently hosted a conference in Dublin dedicated to discussing repeal. Speakers were a mix of Irish and international guests and included Lisa Lindelef, a board member of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation. After a morning of hearing about the challenges facing women seeking abortions in Ireland, she told the crowd, “I could be at a conference in the United States right now.”

Not all the foreigners in the room were visiting. Emily Waszak, a textile designer from North Carolina, was among those performing a slightly different role. Along with at least two Canadians and three other Americans, she is a core member of the ARC, a two-year-old abortion rights organization that has more than 600 contributing members. She felt compelled to get involved with abortion rights activism after she moved to Ireland for her husband and learned about its legal restrictions. “For some people who have lived here their whole lives, the notion of abortion being legal in Ireland is just too much,” she said. “It seems crazy, like that could never happen. But we’re sort of from outside, saying, ‘No, it could.’”

At the Dublin conference, she shared her experience with an audience of more than 170 people. “I was 15 when I had my abortion,” she said. “I had it in my hometown, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, less than 10 miles away from where I lived. It was free, it was safe, and it was legal.”

Waszak sees her story as a model for what might be possible in Ireland. “No trauma, no hand-wringing, no sob story, no regret,” she said. “No panels of men deciding who is or isn’t deserving. Just a medical procedure. A conversation between a woman or girl and her doctor. That’s what abortion services could look like in Ireland if we repealed the Eighth Amendment.”

Though she does not have the right to vote in Ireland, the ARC offers her and other immigrants a powerful means of influencing debate. During her talk, she encouraged attendees to participate in the upcoming March for Choice, a rally organized by the ARC. Two weeks later, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Dublin, demanding a public vote on repealing the Eighth.