The Repeal Jumper
The repeal jumper is the Icon of the 2018 campaign to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Constitution, which in 1983, had accorded equal rights to the unborn and their mothers.
I see this jumper and I am immediately transported to May 2018 when this Amendment was repealed. And then I am transported further back to 1983, and the campaign to have this Amendment inserted in the Constitution.
It was a lost battle from the start, but it was important to take part, to oppose the equalisation of the life of a grown woman with that of a foetus she carried. At any stage of the development of that foetus.
Opposition took the form of the Vote No campaign, the Anti-Amendment Campaign.
We leafleted Saturday morning shopping crowds. Usually the reaction was negative, being called murderers was common. “Whore”, hissed an elderly priest at me. “Whores”, he whispered at my companions, young women handing out Vote No leaflets. I pretended I hadn’t heard. “What’s that you said, Father? Speak up, I can’t hear you.” He scuttled away muttering.
I remember driving to Castlebar from Galway in the dark to hear Noel Browne speak against this amendment. The audience was a belligerent herd, including clergy and nuns who roared personal abuse at Browne. Half of that audience would not have been alive except for the success of his TB eradication programme.
On one level, the vitriol, the ignorance, and the performative piety were risible. On a deeper level they were terrifying: the misogyny, the cruelty of these ideas informed the policy and the ideology that had proposed this vicious Amendment that had such appalling consequences for the lives of women. Think of Miss X, think of Savita Halappanavar, think of the thousands of women forced to carry unwanted or unviable pregnancies, think of those forced to travel to the Uk at vast expense, for basic healthcare. Think of the related cases of Ann Lovett, Joann Hayes, Majella Moynihan
We asserted Opposition quietly, timidly in tiny badges, mainly in ambiguous terms: SPUC OFF, ONE IN 10,000,. I was afraid to speak out except in like-minded company. Women couldn’t speak of our own experiences.
But in a way, 1983 turned out to be the beginning of the last Hurrah for Catholic fascism.
What a different Ireland this REPEAL JUMPER represents.
The conversation had changed: the call for repealing the 8th Amendment was also about everything it represented.
Massive crowds turning out for the Pope’s visit in 1981 had dwindled to a trickle for the next papal visit in 2018. In the 35 years between the insertion of the 8th Amendment and the call for its removal: contraception had been legalised, divorce had been legalised, marriage equality was endorsed
This REPEAL JUMPER beyond its call for the repeal of the 8th Amendment is an icon, a celebration of a new Ireland.
In 1983, images of dismembered foetuses blared from lampposts and were the dominant iconography of the Amendment campaign. IN 2018, No longer did Opposition to misogyny and theocracy need to be whispered from tiny badges, it could be proclaimed loudly and clearly by the single word REPEAL writ large. White letters on black sweatshirts. Worn with pride by so many people.
So different from 1983 when pro-choice did not dare to speak its name. In 2018, my daughters, my husband, most of my friends posed proudly in their REPEAL JUMPERS. Personal stories of women’s private reproductive choices filled the airwaves and were taken seriously; the country sat up and acknowledged reality.
The day before the referendum, I stood on a shaking pedestrian bridge over a motorway at rush hour. A crowd of people wearing our REPEAL jumpers waved banners urging a yes vote. Most the traffic below hooted loudly in agreement. In town that night, so many wore their hearts on their sweatshirt chests proclaiming their voting intentions.
To me this jumper represents a triumph, a victory over a version of Ireland that should have died a long time ago