Campuses across Ireland are readying themselves for a referendum on the eighth amendment. With only months to go before a vote, pro-life students are planning and organising in the face of a groundswell of student support behind repeal.
At NUI Galway (NUIG), Auditor of NUIG Life Society Mia Dovel, speaking to The University Times, explained that she feels that young people and student groups are the engine of the pro-life movement: “All the energy in this campaign is coming from young people.” Her society attends the Rally for Life annually, as well as inviting speakers to campus, participating in debates and planning targeted question and answer sessions “where students talk to other students… and hopefully that’ll start the process of changing people’s opinions”. She also hopes that this will contribute to “opening up the topic for discussion”.
Their involvement spreads far beyond the walls of the university. Dovel explained that members of the society have been canvassing local neighbourhoods, usually with a larger pro-life umbrella group – once a week, “ever since last year and years before that”. However, this effort has been stepped up in anticipation of a referendum. From canvassing one night a week on a Thursday, the society now actively encourages members to canvass three times a week. In addition, members have received an on-campus training session from the Life Institute, a pro-life think tank, in which they received media training in order “to get people prepared to have conversations about the upcoming referendum”. On top of this, she said, “we’ll have sent letters to our TDs encouraging them to protect life”.
Trinity’s newly-formed Students for Life – which, unlike NUIG Life Society, is not affiliated with any central university governance board like the Central Societies Committee – is less concentrated in its efforts toward the referendum, perhaps because of their relative youth. This is not to say, however, that they aren’t conscious of or preparing for the vote. Speaking to The University Times, Kate Kleinle, a committee member and organiser for the group, described their mobilisation in anticipation of the vote, predicted to take place next May: “We are planning on stepping up our activity before the referendum. Generally speaking we’re very focused on activism, be that attending marches, getting groups together to go for debates… and reaching out to people in college who might be pro-life or who might not have their minds made up.”
A pro-life march a few months ago gathered significant crowds, while both pro-choice and pro-life campaign groups have stepped up their preparations for a referendum in recent weeks.
The Citizens’ Assembly’s recommendations, released in April, came as a blow to the pro-life campaign with calls for a dramatic liberalistion of abortion law. However, since then senior politicians in government have expressed some doubts about the suggestions from the consultative body.
Much like Dovel, whose society aims to reach out to undecided young voters on campus with their question and answer sessions, so too do Kleinle and her organisation feel that they have a role to play through the same sort of “outreach” and “education” and, in particular, probing the concerns and queries that undecideds may have on the issue with open dialogue.
Providing more than just adding their voices to the pro-life movement as voters and campaigners in general, both stressed the particular importance of student groups in representing young voices within a group that is often perceived to represent an older Ireland. Kleinle said that “it’s easy to forget that all pro-lifers aren’t just the older generation and so I do think that leading up to the referendum that we make our presence known if for no other reason than that it shows that the face of the pro life movement is a diverse one”.
This, according to Kleine, is “what makes the movement strong”. Dovel echoed this view, framing the need for engagement not only in efficacy or representation, but in the impact it will have on this generation. She pointed out that “these are our lives and we’re going to live in this country and we need to have a say…we’re in that age group that will be directly affected by this”.
Neither group feels as though its role is confined to or even defined by the upcoming referendum. There is a distinct sense of the need to provide something of a haven for pro-life views on pro-choice campuses. Dovel says that to her, the Life Society is a “really good support for everyone in the university who’s pro-life and wants to express that”. Similarly, Kleinle and her group aim to “provide a place for students who feel as we do, and to communicate a network and speak about why we feel that way”.
She added that this is particularly pressing in the Trinity context, where support for abortion rights has both large contemporary support, and longstanding historical precedent. “It can be quite isolating”, she said, “if you don’t have a network of people who feel the same way you do especially in an environment where the topic at hand is so important and so deeply personal, and where it can be quite difficult to physically find other pro life people”.
Both Kleinle and Dovel say there are certain stereotypes about the pro-life movement. Dovel in particular highlighted a feeling that there is a general perception that the pro-choice movement is the necessarily “right-thinking” side of the argument. Her concerns around abortion – familiar to anyone who has engaged in the abortion debate in Ireland – are around a disproportionate impact on female foetuses and the disabled.
“Choosing the rights of the mother above the most fundamental right of a certain group of people is not something we should be voting on”, Dovel said.
Kleinle too, opposes certain stereotypes about the pro-life movement and feels that the existence of pro life student groups allows members to emphasise the diversity of both the nature and ideological groundings of their opposition to abortion.
Kleinle in particular resents the idea not only that religion is inherent in pro-life movement – although she admitted that Ireland’s historical context may influence this – but that pro-lifers are anti-progressive. Her views, she stressed, are not only secular but have a strong social justice underpinning. Abortion she feels “disproportionately impacts the disabled, the socio economically disadvantaged, communities of colour. It’s a situation that exacerbates a lot of societal and systemic problems”.
