In the wake of Roe: Hope in Ireland’s example

Ailbhe Smyth Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
I'd like to first say, welcome. Thank you so much Ailbhe for joining us all the way in Dublin. We really feel honored to have you as part of what we feel is a very important and timely conversation on what is happening with women's reproductive rights, specifically in Ireland, how that is also translating to the conversation around the world, and even a broader discussion around women's empowerment feminism, and a personal discussion on your journey over nearly 40 years of activism. So thank you so much for being with us today.

Ailbhe Smyth
Well, thank you for asking me it really is a delight, and also a privilege to be able to have this kind of conversation.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Now Ailbhe, as I understand it, you were born to middle class parents in Dublin, and actually trace some of your earliest exposure to feminist thinking all the way back to your Catholic grade school. Tell us more about that.

Ailbhe Smyth
Well, it was absolutely typical for girls in Ireland at the time. They were very interesting religious order who had come to Ireland from England, and they very much encouraged us as young girls just growing up to think in terms of having a working life or even a career, I didn't really have that word career in my vocabulary, I think at that time, but to think in terms of a job and work being important, and that was very unusual for middle class girls in Ireland at that time. So I consider myself really very fortunate to have these progressive forward looking women who were educating me. So I grew up thinking, Oh, I would be able to go to university. And in fact, I was the first girl in my very large, extended family. I was supposed to go to university in that family. And I did, and I studied English and French, which seemed to be a good choice for a girl and I didn't really think very much about what the future might hold for me. But when I qualified, I was actually offered a job in the University College Dublin in the department of French. And of course, I took it. I didn’t think ‘Oh this is the beginning of an academic career.’ It was quite simply a job. It seemed interesting. It was going to give me wages. And I thought, yes, I'll go for this. And that was actually how an academic career of 40 years started. Without any great planning, quite quickly. And then ads a young woman, in this very Catholic country, I began to run into difficulties.

Kassia Binkowski
Okay, so here you are a middle class girl in Ireland, you come up through Catholic schools, and then you're the first in your family to graduate University. That would have been an impressive story in and of itself. But from here, you managed to launch an amazing career in women's rights, mostly through academia and activism. I'm curious, what was some of your earliest exposure to these issues? When did you start to feel the pushback and the limitation that the system was placing around upon women in Ireland,

Ailbhe Smyth
I was growing up in a society where there was no contraception, no divorce, the question of abortion was completely, you know, you know, from another planet, and where nobody really talked about our sexual lives. I mean, I'm lesbian now. But you know, at that time, I had never heard the words gay and lesbian, never mind, trans and so on. These were not part of my thinking. They weren't part of my world, they weren't part of anybody's world here. So it was really very difficult. And I had, obviously, you know, friends, pals, mates. And they said, to me, what you need to do about the contraception is you need to go to your family doctor. And to say that your menstrual cycle is very irregular and that you think you probably need the pill. So I went to my family doctor and said precisely this. I said, Well, you know, I didn't use the term menstrual cycle, I just said, ‘You know, my periods are a bit irregular.’ And he then immediately said, ‘Oh, I think you need to go on the pill.’ And that was how I got a prescription for the pill. And, in retrospect, it's very clear to me that there was, you know, a complicity there. The doctors knew very well, what young women and indeed, older women, married women were doing. And I think I really reached a point where I began to have some glimmers of understanding about my life, and the kinds of contradictions that it contained. But as soon as I got married, even the day I was getting married, I knew that this was not me. It really didn't feel right at all. And very, very soon after my marriage, within a few weeks, I became very ill. And it was at that point that the doctors said I was having a breakdown. And that the reason I was having a breakdown was because I was suffering very acutely from anorexia nervosa, which was barely diagnosed in Ireland in those days. And that was obviously a huge shock for me. And an even bigger shock, I think, in some ways for my family, and also for my then husband, because I went into a psychiatric hospital for treatment. And it came out in the course of the several months I was there that I really didn't want to be married. So it was agreed between me - well really between my family - and my husband that the marriage would end.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So Ailbhe, I'd like to speak a little bit about the becoming aware of contradictory expectations placed on young women to be wives to be mothers to be successful professionals. Anecdotally, I recently had a conversation with my mother who told me that she thinks her generation fed my generation a lie. That in the 1950s, and 60s and before the pendulum had swung to such an extreme You, as a woman, were a mother and nothing else. And then later on it, perhaps swung to the other side of the pendulum, which was you can have everything without really acknowledging that you're taking care of yourself and your mental health oftentimes comes at a sacrifice to my partner, my children, my career, all of these other things. I'd like to understand a little bit more in your journey. Was there a moment or was there a person maybe who helped you kind of get over that hump and understand what your path was?

Ailbhe Smyth
I think I was really saved by the women's movement, but beneath that I was saved by the fact of my caste position and the privileges that brought me. Because I was able to get good, reasonably good psychiatric treatment. I say reasonably good because psychiatrists didn't really have any kind of feminist understanding, or any inclination to have a feminist understanding. But my situation, also, as a very young academic meant that I was accustomed to going up, looking up things and finding books and asking friends to find me books about anorexia, and also about the women's movement. And around about 70 to 73, I suppose I was beginning just to put the pieces together. And to begin to say to myself, ‘This is terrible for me, I don't want to be married.’ I'm not sure that it was done, I couldn't be married. But I just didn't want to be. I couldn't see the point of this. And that, in a way, that burden of being a woman was what was making me feel that I couldn't be the kind of woman that didn't want to be the sort of woman that my whole background, society and culture wanted, and in a very real sense, needed me to be. And that the only way that I would be able to get myself out of this was to kind of think my way through it, and to equip myself with as much knowledge as I could. And as I say, I consider that I was incredibly fortunate that I had the kind of access and the training from my degree to do that. And this has made me ever since you know, very, very aware of how incredibly important education is for girls, for women, and so on.

Kassia Binkowski
So I'm really curious, if you can tell us a little bit more about how you evolved from this period of your life of wanting to diminish yourself to quite literally being one of the foremost leaders and activists for women's rights in Ireland. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit more about how your own path towards health and really precipitated your activism around women's reproductive rights and abortion.

Ailbhe Smyth
Well, when I when I recovered, mostly, I was in my job working away. And at that time, Women's Studies was emerging in North America and in other parts of Europe. And I thought, ‘What a great idea women’s studies, let's do that here in Ireland, we will have some of that, thank you very much.’ And I started to work with a number of other women here in Ireland, on developing Women's Studies, and introducing into my own work in the university, a feminist perspective. And that meant, of course, that I was constantly in contact with other feminist activists, and began to realize that just because I was in the university didn't mean that I couldn't also be an activist, that being an educational activist was very important, but that I could also go and campaign and march and rally and fight for on the streets, the rights that I and so many others were fighting for at that time. So those years in this country we were fighting tooth and nail for contraception, which eventually we did actually get. A right to abortion didn't come on the agenda until the early 1980s. But it was always going to come. We were also fighting for women's rights to sexual freedom, freedom in our sexual identities. And we were fighting against violence against women and for equal pay, and for childcare, all of those issues were there, absolutely on the table and on the streets, in the 1970s and the 80s. And we had gained very little at that stage. So it was constant action. I think that was truly a key factor in making me better — that I got so involved and engaged and had to focus on goals. And I didn't think of it as focused on goals. I mean, this was my life.

Kassia Binkowski
It's a really interesting trajectory, from academia to activism. And I think it's, it's very clear for you that this was never about just the research and the education that that you needed to take to the streets, you needed to see the practical application.

Ailbhe Smyth
Yes, and to bring what I knew with me, and to let that be part of my contribution. And just to say that, obviously, in Ireland where we had to fight so hard for the most basic reproductive rights in the 70s. And then, when we had a referendum which prohibited abortion, which was always illegal anyway, in 1983, that really stiffened my backbone hugely to understanding and realizing that without that fundamental freedom over our bodies, we did not have freedom, full stop. We just simply did not have freedom as women, but that freedom had to be gained. So that was a very early issue for me, a very early recognition. Stemming from my own experience of not being able to get contraception when when I was a very young woman myself and always being worried about becoming pregnant, what would I do, because to be an what we called a non married mother, in those days was to really be condemning myself and my child or children to be condemning us to a nightmare of life.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So this actually is a very important transition. You mentioned the 1983 referendum to make abortion illegal and not only illegal, but it was one of the most restrictive bans on abortion globally. And I'd like to transition now to the Together for Yes campaign. The story, as you know, is beautifully told in the documentary film, The Eighth, and your decades of activism and your role in academia, I think, probably primed you for this battle. For our listeners who may not be following Irish politics and may not be aware of this Together for Yes, campaign was, in 2018, the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment - a referendum to make abortion illegal in Ireland, and and to repeal the amendment in order to legalize women's access to abortion up to 12 weeks. And your leadership of the campaign was covered in this documentary, the story, the voices, the people who were able to come together in order to overturn the Eighth Amendment. How did you take on this leadership position? You mentioned a little bit about you were primed for this fight. But what was the impetus for you to really step into a leadership role here?

Ailbhe Smyth
Well, first of all, let me say that, you know, I always worked with many other women. So I was by no means alone in that leadership, quite the contrary. But back in 1983, I was involved in opposing that referendum to put this into our Constitution, which was so draconian and severe. So you know, I had become, if you like a pro choice, I became a pro choice activist in the early 1980s. I was pro choice anyway. But I became an activist in the 1980s. And we had another referendum in 92, which was quite complicated. But it effectively asked us if we wanted women to be able to have information about abortion and travel, and we said yes, but we weren't asked to remove that awful clause from the Constitution. But we had the same kind of referendum again in 2002. So that every decade, the 1980s, the 1990s, up into the first decade of the 2000s abortion was on the activist agenda. It was absolutely centrally on the feminist agenda one way and another. So it was a running wound, it was a running sore. So it was an issue which for me, was always there totally on the agenda. There was never a moment when I was not involved in pro choice, politics. So back in 2013, in 2012, there was a very tragic death here of young woman called Savita Halappanavar, who died as a result directly of sepsis. And but she, the sepsis was because she was denied an abortion when she was miscarrying, because there was still a fetal heartbeat. And this was a situation she was young Indian woman who'd come to work here now. And along with her husband, this was a wanted baby, first baby, and she was treated so abominably and so tragically, that when she needed that abortion for her to save her life, it couldn't be carried out, according to the heart, the Catholic hospital because there was a fetal heartbeat. And because of the law in Ireland, because of the Constitution, this outraged everyone. And people marched, even those who were not particularly pro choice. I mean, people were really outraged. And at that time, myself and a friend Sinead Kennedy decided that we would set up a platform to bring together groups and organizations across the country and from different sectors to fight for appeal of the Eighth Amendment. And we set that up a couple of years later, as the coalition to repeal the Eighth Amendment.

Kassia Binkowski
The film does a beautiful job telling the story of this campaign and the fight that you led. We have talked about your personal journey to finding your voice and how transformational that was for you as an academic and activist. In the film, we can't help but see parallels to this campaign right? Parallels to how creating space for human voices and human stories was pivotal to the trajectory of the of the work that you all were doing with Together for Yes. How did that strategy unfold? And what impact did you see it have on the campaign at large?

Ailbhe Smyth
Well, you know, that’s really at the heart of that political campaigning. You get nowhere unless there is an appeal, or unless you're appealing and speaking to people's hearts and to their emotions and to their feelings as much as and, in fact, probably even more than to their heads. So I think that we there were so many terrible cases, particularly the case of Savita Halappanavar, that we understood, had opened people up to the possibility of this big radical change happening in Ireland. We knew that those personal accounts of abortion or of the refusal or the denial of abortion or the awfulness of having to travel, for an abortion and so on. And I think that all along that journey of research, which was done really in focus groups, which was very much about listening to people, we understood that one of the key things is you have to listen to people, you have to know where people are at. You have to know what their questions are, what their reservations are. And we heard all the time, throughout that process, that people always acknowledged how sad it was, that a woman had died in 2012, that other women had died, that women had to go travel, that women had to travel to Britain to end pregnancies where there was, for example, a fatal abnormality in the fetus, that these were terribly, terribly sad things and that, once they made that recognition, they were saying ‘That's not right. That's not good enough.’ So we knew that people were prepared to listen to women. And over the couple of years before the actual referendum, organizations like the abortion rights campaign, and others, were working with women to tell those stories, to bring those stories out into the open, which was so so hard to do. I mean, I have nothing but a huge admiration for the courage of those women. And often, they spoke as couples with their partners as well. Because abortion was so utterly stigmatized and silenced, you just could not, you couldn't admit to having had an abortion. The word abortion wasn't used. In one of the the referendum campaigns, it was referred to as the substantive issue. And I just remember standing up and shouting at a group of politicians, ‘Women don't go to England to have a substantive issue, they go to have an abortion, you've got a record this.’ So it was incredibly silenced. So gradually, it was, you know, this was integrated more and more into our thinking about how we would campaign so that when we came to have this Together for Yes campaigning vehicle, we were ready to go and determined that the pool of people there, women, and sometimes, as I say, their partners to who would be prepared to speak about these really painful, difficult experiences for many - and experiences, which we discovered, so many women had never spoken about. Maybe women in their 50s, or 60s or older who taught abortions, spoke about those experiences and had never done so before women bearing witness to their own experience were, I think, really compelling. Of course, you have to do all of the other campaigning things as well.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I think this is such a prime example of how hearing the human voices behind what is often a divisive issue shows that it is not just a political debate between politicians. It is this is a real human issue that affects women every single day all over the world, and can potentially be life threatening. But it doesn't have to be because we have the means and we have the technology to be able to help women to give them that comfort of knowing that we won't abandon them. So tthe human voices, the human stories - it sounds to me like what was what really changed the wind in our Ireland during that time.

Ailbhe Smyth
I mean, I've been always seen as a radical and revolutionary throughout my adult life. And it's only recently that people have begun to say to me, you were right about that revolution. You know, I mean, obviously, me and hundreds and thousands and millions of feminists around the world. I never thought of myself as any of those things. That was the point I wanted to make. But that over a lifetime, you can actually see why people thought it was radical to do certain things, but also how over that lifetime, those things no longer seem radical to the general population.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Well that I think just shows that renegades throughout history have been labeled as radical renegades or revolutionaries, like you're saying, but they're just ahead of their time. And it takes time for society to catch up to them, which we always do eventually.

Ailbhe Smyth
Yes, yes.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I'd like to just take a step back to acknowledge that your role in the Together for Yes campaign was perhaps one of your more public roles in activism to date, however, you've been fighting for women's rights for nearly 40 years now. And today, it seems like the word feminist can have some divisive and some might say fairly negative associations. How have you seen the definition of feminists evolve? And what do you think we need to do to change that current perception in order to have allies in women and men around the world?

Ailbhe Smyth
Well, you know, I, I am very hopeful about feminism at the present time, because I think it went through a bad time, for a decade. And I think that we've been emerging from that in many countries all around the world over the past several years or so. And I do feel very, very hopeful. But feminism has never been just one template, or one model, or one way of doing or being. Feminism has to be and must be a very large and generous and open space. I always think of it as a mansion with very many rooms and extensions. And growing into a city, you know, that if feminism must always be evolving. And I think we're possibly at a moment of great movement and momentum, and radicalism and so on, on the one hand, but at the same time, there is through populism and the spread of right wing movement, I'm just thinking of Europe even just at the moment, but throughout the world, that it is also a time of great threat. So that's not a time to back off. That's actually a time when you need to hold to the principles and the truths, and the foundations that you believe are valid and useful and also, to always be on the alert, listening to what others are saying they need and what they want and what freedom is for them.