Workers Solidarity Movement

As the referendum to remove the 8th amendment approaches in Ireland the No campaign are turning to increasingly nasty shock tactics.  The 8th amendment passed in 1983 removes healthcare control from pregnant people and puts it in the hands of the courts, it was inserted to ban abortion but in fact impacts every aspect of pregnancy.

In  the latest in a series of disgusting stunts No campaigners have put graphic posters up all around the Health minister’s constituency and in particular his office. In the posters an image of what is probably a miscarried foetus has been placed behind his standard election image. We've blurred that part of the image out here because such images can be traumatic, particularly for those who have had miscarriages or sought abortion because of fatal foetal abnormality.

This is part of an escalating campaign of shock tactics by the No campaigns which have also seen multiple pickets of maternity hospitals using similar images, even when the hospitals themselves have requested they cease.

Such images which typically show dismembered foetuses at advanced stages of development are nothing new, Youth Defence, the main organisation behind Save 8, displayed them outside the GPO in Dublin for many years. Their use in this manner reminds us that the referendum is not simply about restoring control to pregnant people over their own healthcare but also a vote on what sort of Ireland we want to live in. Their Ireland is the one of industrial schools, the mass grave in a septic tank at Tuam and the covering up of clerical child abuse. They are as much fighting to restore that as to defeat this particular referendum.