In Ireland's capitalist society, child rearing is an expensive, isolating business with little or no state nursery provision, cutbacks in health and welfare services and a massive unemployment rate creating hardship and poverty for thousands of children, especially the children of single parents who are left to cope with hopelessly inadequate social and economic support systems. If the child is unfortunate to be handicapped in any way, the parents face a life of unending struggle to get access to the services the child needs, services which often do not even exist in this state. Yet the anti-abortionists have succeeded in establishing the supremacy of the foetus's right to life over the woman's right to physical and mental health and personal choice. Women choose abortion for all kinds of reasons- because of rape or incest, because they already have too many children, because their health would be damaged by another pregnancy, because they could not cope with rearing a handicapped child in this society, or simply because they do not want a child. All of these reasons are valid and the choice must be the woman's only, not dictated by any medical or religious body.
Abortion is also a class issue.
The question of free access to abortion in this country, not Britain, is a vital one for thousands of working class women who not only have to furtively seek out the information they need but also have to raise the considerable costs involved both of the operation itself and of the travel to England. The fight for abortion rights in Ireland. In 1979 the Family Planning Act made contraception slightly legal in this country. Many feminists and people on the left felt confident that the 1980s would see Ireland move in the direction of the rest of Europe in terms of social legislation. It was thought that as the decade progressed contraception would become freely available, divorce would be introduced, and eventually abortion would be introduced at least in limited circumstances.