Ireland's Very Secular Vote on Abortion
DUBLIN—Millions of Irish people are voting today on whether to liberalize or maintain the country’s abortion laws, which are among the most restrictive in the world. Polls opened in the early morning, but the results of the referendum won’t be announced until Saturday. Regardless of how people vote, Ireland’s relationship to abortion has already changed. “We’re having conversations now that we have never had before in my country,” Fiona de Londras, a professor of global legal studies at the University of Birmingham, told me.
As voters prepared to cast their votes, it seemed there wasn’t a street pole in Dublin without a sign on it about the referendum. Also mingling in the streets were Irish expats. Thousands of them, it was estimated, would be flying home from around the world to participate in what has been dubbed a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Of the 1.4 million Irish citizens living abroad, 40,000 are eligible to vote in Irish elections—and those who are must do so in person.
When I spoke with Deirdre Ni Chloscai last week, she was preparing to travel from New York to her“Only two weeks ago, one of my friends told me about the ‘Abroad For Yes’ page and I saw that there were so many people getting home to vote and getting sponsored to go home to vote,” she said. “So I put up a GoFundMe page and was lucky enough to be funded in 12 hours to go home.”
