2018 Irish 8th Amendment (Abortion) Referendum

[ObserverIE]

To take a hypothetical, if Northern Ireland were part of the Republic of Ireland, would that hurt or help efforts to repeal the abortion law?    

It's very hard to say, given that we don't even know how ROI will vote, and turnout in NI can also vary by issue. The historical facts are that as part of a larger state, with occasional pressure from a minority in Westminster to harmonise abortion law to the rest of the UK, NI has retained the same prohibition-in-practice as ROI, in part through anti-abortion agitation and community pressure against abortion clinics to close them down. All the grand sociological facts about different demographics don't matter here: the DUP and SDLP in particular are strongly pro-life, whereas in Alliance and the UUP it's a matter for legislator conscience, while SF naturally agrees with whatever the leadership says or they quit the party.

Would the SDLP really be strongly pro life? I thought their middle class vote would be fairly Liberal in social questions.

Middle-class "cultural Catholics" in Northern Ireland for whom social liberalism is the be-all and end-all will probably vote for Alliance or (where they're present) the Greens, and widespread abortion availability is nowhere near as popular a cause as gay marriage - anyone looking at referendum posters at the moment will struggle to find a Yes poster mentioning the A-word or dealing in anything except the most circuitous euphemisms whereas the No posters are quite direct about what they're opposing. We don't (yet) have a politics in Ireland where economic and social liberalism march together in lockstep in the way that the United States has.

What opinion polling there's been doesn't show a major divergence in attitudes between north and south, although northern Protestants tend to be relatively more hostile to gay marriage and northern Catholics relatively more hostile to abortion.

[ObserverIE]

Well, the Yes posters are very clear what they support: expand medical care and give women choice. Almost nobody is "pro-abortion", supportive of abortion as a systemic policy, in any country actually; I suppose some anti-natalist governments were. But this is a distinction many are content to miss in order to promulgate the usual myths about politicians being lyin' Hillarys, or a psycho Jewish Soros conspiracy.

Other than by the Trots, choice isn't being mentioned and the focus is pretty exclusively on hard cases. I'm pointing out that support for the principle of abortion without restrictions among the general population is fairly weak (21% in an Irish Times opinion poll last year with 67% opposed) so the messaging is necessarily circumspect to the point of avoidance.

I'm not an anti-semite or even a decided voter yet, by the way, but thanks for the guilt by association.