Together For Yes - Ireland

"My name is Shira Donohu, and I was born in Dublin in 1944, and grew up in education, a Catholic school in my life." Here in the U.S., many state governments have recently banned abortion after six weeks of gestation, before most people even know their pregnant. And in the case of Alabama, they voted to ban the procedure outright. As abortion access is under attack here, we're taking a look at a country that outlawed abortion entirely, only to recently reverse course. Ireland. "Had you told me you're pregnant, I would have taken the baby. You know, you wouldn't have seen it from the woman's point of view. I would have only seen it. Oh, here is a baby, a potential baby now gone. That's how I would have seen it then." In 1983, Ireland held a public vote on whether or not to enact the Athe amendment to their constitution. Although abortion had been banned in Ireland since 1861, when they called it "procuring a miscarriage," advocates campaigned to write into the constitution the equal right to life for the unborn and the person carrying it. "I just know we would have voted to put it into the constitution, because that was what we would have been advised to do by the priest at Mass on a Sunday. When you got married, you promised to welcome into the world whatever children got sent to you. You didn't take any contraception. My mother, for example, was in eight years at seven children. And you just accepted this, you moved on, and you just got on with life." On September 7, 1983, Sheila, along with 67% of voters in Ireland, chose to add the Athe amendment to their constitution, solidifying the ban on abortion in their country, seemingly forever. "People say to me, you got to be crazy, how can you sing in times like these? Don't you read the news? Don't you know the score, how can you sing, and so many others read? By way of a reply, I say a fool, such a guy who sees his song somewhere to begin." This is Brave New Words, and I'm a not shanker of audio. As a communications consultant, working with advocates for human rights, equality, and justice, I believe the job of a good message isn't to say what's popular. It's to make popular what we need said. I examine people's underlying assumptions and perceptions in order to understand why certain messages resonate where others falter. And now, with the help of some of the world's boldest, most strategic, and accomplished campaigners, I'm exploring the words that have won us progressive victories. These six episodes can provide a playbook for how to engage our base, persuade the middle, and reveal the opposition for the outliers they are. Okay, let me set the scene a little bit, and I'll go over some of the consequences of the Eighth Amendment. Until 1992, it was illegal for doctors in Ireland to provide information about how to receive an abortion outside of the country, and abortion was illegal even in the case of rape. Then, in 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that women could receive an abortion if the woman's life was at risk because of the pregnancy. But numerous attempts were subsequently made by Ireland's parliament to overturn this decision. And as a result, since 1980, 170,000 women traveled to the UK for an abortion. Many people resorted to illegally buying abortion pills online, and all the while tensions around the abortion debate heightened. Then, in 2016, the government took an unusual step. They established a citizen's assembly, a 99-member group selected to represent the larger Irish electorate, and those 99 people were mandated to deliberate on some of the most critical issues facing the country, like climate change, population aging, and yes, abortion. Their ultimate decision? To hold a referendum on whether to repeal and replace the Eighth Amendment. The people would decide the fate of Ireland's Eighth Amendment on the 25th of May, 2018. Talking about abortion requires navigating a gauntlet of challenges. You must contend with stereotyping about women as irresponsible or promiscuous, counteropposition attacks, and confront religious doctrine that shape beliefs about when life begins, the proper role of women, the purpose of family, and the morality of sex. And then there's the public's displeasure with having the debate at all, a distaste for making what is indeed deeply personal into something not just political, but seemingly vitriolic and entrenched. And beyond all that, there's the very basic problem of having to make people not just listen or consider, but actually take action, go out, and vote, which is hard, no matter the cause. All these degrees of difficulty tend to bring out the very worst messaging, a set of known problems I was able to discuss with the brilliant architects of Together for Yes, in a messaging workshop right at the outside of their campaign. There's a tendency to focus on horror stories that can make people just want to tune it all out, and disengage when we need to inspire them to persuade others and act. Attendancy to focus on debunking our opposition, which has the proven backfire effect of giving them more airtime and credence. And the tendency to have ever changing talking points that mean you never break a consistent signal through the political noise. However, Together for Yes, the coalition to repeal the Eighth Amendment avoided those pitfalls because the people involved had been engaged in this fight for a long time. And yet, they were totally willing to listen closely to their target audience, interrogate their assumptions about how to frame arguments, and relentlessly repeat what worked. The coalition to repeal the Eighth Amendment had been set up to bring people together back in 2013. And at that stage, we had something like 120 member organisations. That's all for Smith, one of the co-directors of Together for Yes. So that coalition was creating the unity we needed to fight what was going to be a very tough, a very difficult, a very challenging campaign. And we knew that because, of course, we have a very long history of extremely bitter and divisive campaigns. This was going to be our sixth referendum campaign in 35 years on the issue of abortion. So we knew that we had to bring people together, that that was absolutely the first thing we had to do, and that we then had to work with the member organisations in that coalition to build a wide grassroots movement. There's a lot of different frameworks that one can put forward as kind of their top-line story about abortion. What was that conversation like, and how did you get there? Well, I think we sat about that in a number of different ways. We had our experiences really in Ireland of campaigning on very strong pro-choice messaging, which we had done much more in 1992 and in 2002. And we decided that really what we needed to do was to actually go and see what people were really thinking in the country about abortion. Because fundamental, and this was before the Citizens Assembly, by the way, it all predated all of that, this was about saying to ourselves, look, we know that people dislike very intensely the divisiveness and the bitterness of the sort of anti-abortion and pro-choice positions. And they see themselves as not being able to get a word in edge ways, because you have the anti-abortion opponents on the one side and the pro-choice proponents, I call them, on the other side. And the vast majority of people, it was the feeling of some of us in the coalition, had the sense that they didn't participate in that conversation. That there was no space, there was no place for them. There was no place for them to articulate their questions, their reservations, their fears, their worries, their anxieties. So then, how did you all approach that issue? How did you take into account what you heard from people and have that inform what you said back to them? In 2016, after the general election, and I think it was kind of in the run-up actually to the Citizens Assembly, we commissioned Focus Group Research. And it served a very, very good purpose, because we were able to make clear through the research that in order to repeal the Eighth Amendment, we needed to pitch the messaging in a somewhat different way. Yes, it's a human right, but actually fundamentally, this is something which women need. And it is something that women need for their well-being in the world. It is something that they need for their health. So health understood in that broad and generous sense of your well-being in the world. And that it really was important for us to be able to appeal to the voters, to switch them from seeing some rather abstract notion of abortion as right, to seeing abortion in a much more everyday kind of circumstance. It can happen in a person's life that they need an abortion and that to prevent them from being able to access is very damaging. It is stressful, it entails suffering, it entails traveling, it entails ultimately damage to the well-being of a woman and from that a woman and to her partner, her family, her community. So always moving outwards, woman as center but always staying connected with family, staying connected with community, staying connected with the society as a whole because we needed to make the point all the time through our messaging that yes, the decision is a woman's decision but it is an issue for our society as a whole. It is about the kind of society that we want to live in which meant that we could then go on to ask key questions which were crucial to our messaging. Is this a society which really cares about what happens to women? Is it a society which has compassion for people who find themselves in need of an abortion, who find themselves in a difficult situation? So messages of care and compassion came in there and in fact our three seas of the messaging ultimately were care, compassion and change. In defiance of a standard approach to abortion which says that it's a private issue with tropes like laws off my body or my body, my choice, together for yass made a collective appeal for compassion. As you'll hear in this ad, this appeal was rooted first in reminding audiences of times and ways Irish people had demonstrated this collective spirit, how they'd fallen short on abortion and then offering the opportunity to rectify this toward a better future, not merely an end to bad things in the present. Pride, it's something that we are really good at, coming together for the moments that make this country great, grand slams and river dance, Italian 90 and yes equality. But what about the moments of shame? Those we're not so good at, generations of letting down women and girls, second class citizens and double standards, burying our heads as they booked their flights, an Irish solution to an Irish problem. No more. On May 25th we come together for our wives, girlfriends, sisters, friends, daughters and granddaughters. Together, let's finally do better. Together, let's be caring and compassionate. Together, let's be proud to live in a progressive Ireland. Together, let's vote yes. Compassion became a really important message because of course it's about empathy, but it's also about giving people who were genuinely emotionally conflicted about abortion. It was about giving them a kind of an option. It was about saying, look, you may really not like the idea of abortion, you may be opposed to abortion, you may not want to see it here, but is it truly compassionate to deny another person the right to something which you feel is wrong? So it was about always asking people to put themselves in the shoes of another. What Alva is describing is a technique called acknowledge and redirect and it's a form of modeling the empathy you seek. So rather than directly confront someone about their feelings, you're wrong and shouldn't think this, you acknowledge their feelings and then pivot to the policy you seek, separating what they feel from how they should behave. If we're asking people to suspend their judgment of people who seek abortions, we can't go in by judging them ourselves. Also notice that with the seas of this campaign, care, compassion and change, there's one sea that's very much missing. Choice. The problem in a way with choice was that it instantly evoked a stereotype for voters and we knew that through the research and we knew it through our own experience, actually, but and the stereotype was in the first instance of rabid campaigning. So they would see people who were not real people, but they heard shouting, they heard argument, they heard quarreling, they heard it's time to turn off the radio noise because I can't stand this anymore. So one of the things that we did quite a lot was to constantly use the words decide decision and so on and so forth. And in that process, you could then introduce the word choice. Obviously, I might start off a talk or a session or a canvas with people by saying, well, you know, it's very important. I think for women to be able to make our own decisions about our bodies and so on and and you know, a couple of minutes later, you might say and and that is about choosing between different options, really, isn't it? And the person would nod their head. So it was not that choice was banished, but rather that it was it was later in the conversation because so much of this campaign was actually about having conversations with people. The stereotyping problem all that describes around choice is one we know well. In Ireland, choice triggered associations around as she puts it, rabid campaigners. In the US, research has demonstrated that because choice is usually used in casual consumerist contexts, it suggests that abortion is a thing people take lightly, that they seek on the spur of the moment without much consideration. Choices, chocolate or vanilla, decaf or calf, not a consequential life event, pro choice as a label, tacitly reaffirms the opposition story of women as careless. And as for the opposition in Ireland, well, it was business as usual. They went out at the very very beginning with posters, which were frankly all fashioned. They came from some kind of dinosaur fantasy image of what Ireland really was. And they were the posters, which sadly we all know too well, which provide photographs, swadis or photographs of blown up fetuses, and basically saying murder and 99% of this, that and the other deaths in Britain do not export. I can't even begin to go through at all, but it was the very graphic, very in your face, very confrontational type of visual imagery that they were using in the campaign. So it kind of alerted people that there was an anti-abortion, I will negatively call them a brigade, who were going to throw everything in our faces. And that was not actually where the mood of the country was. The mood of the country was, this is something that we're realizing and we are beginning to realize that we've been having all of this public awareness and the facts being put out there and so on, that we're going to have to think about. We have to think about this. And in order to think about it, we need peace and quiet. And we need to have, be able to have good sense of irrational conversations where we can say, I agree, I disagree, I need more information, let's talk about it. And people were responding positively to together for yes's message. Very early polls predicted a sizable victory for repealing the eighth amendment. It's an historic day in Ireland. The Irish people have voted in favor of scrapping a constitutional ban on abortion. The result thrilled abortion rights advocates, including the country's prime minister. Today is a historic day for Ireland. A quiet revolution has taken place and today is a great act of democracy. A hundred years since women gain the right to vote. Today we as a people have spoken and we say that we trust women and respect women to make their own decisions and their own choices. And on election day, 66.4% of voters decided to repeal the eighth amendment, a nearly identical margin that had voted for the eighth in 1983. Now people in Ireland would be able to obtain abortion within 12 weeks of pregnancy. And later if the pregnancy was deemed a serious health risk or if there was a fatal abnormality. And as the vote came in, what was the mood like it together for yes headquarters? It's really a lovely story. Again, back to Alva, one of the national coordinators of together for yes. Because one after the other at about 10 o'clock at night, we got two exit polls. And the first poll came out with a 68% victory for yes. And we were saying, "Oh no, that's not possible. It's not possible. We can't believe it." But people started to cry and say, "Yes, we definitely won." But at 3/4 of an hour later, the second poll came out and it was at I think 66%. So we knew at that time, we knew then that we had absolutely won. In fact, we won by 66. 0.4%. But we knew that, and that was about 11 o'clock on midnight, and as I was leaving headquarters, barrels of beer were being shipped in. People had started to celebrate already, and that's young people, and I just thought it was absolutely extraordinary. So we knew the next before the camp was officially over, we absolutely knew that we had won, even though we didn't have the exact percentage, and that was, I mean, to get two thirds of the electorate on one of the highest turnouts ever in a referendum campaign was nothing short of phenomenal, because it was a complete U-turn made by the country, and went against all of the received wisdom. As for why the repeal campaign was so successful, Alva has a few ideas. I think one of the reasons why that campaign did so well was that it gave people the opportunity to make up their own minds without lecturing, without hectoring, without bullying, without saying, this is the politically correct way to think about this issue. We gave them, if you like, real life and said, you have decisions to make, you have moral decisions to make, you have decisions about whether women's lives really matter or really count, and we know that you can make those decisions, because we do know that people in this country are caring and compassionate and so on and so forth, and giving people the space really mattered in that referendum. What it is, it's not just about doing polling, it's about having those really quite detailed conversations with people about what do they see happening now, what do they see happening in the future, what morally do they think should be happening, do they think that's going to be possible and ensuring that the way in which you speak with people is going to be understood by those people with whom you need to communicate. There is no point in telling them, this is what you should be doing, people absolutely hate that, they hate it. And probably finally, this is when I feel particularly strongly about myself, the more you can work together, the better. I mean, I really felt that from putting the coalition together, that we would never win this referendum unless we could cross, you know, political and other divides, unless we could say to people, the only way we're going to win this is if we stick together. And if we, you know, espouse and embrace a common cause and a common aim that we all believe in, and at least for the duration of our campaigning, that we remain sufficiently together and civil and so on and so forth to achieve that. There are multiple perspectives on how to talk about abortion, and one of the most effective is for people to share their personal stories. I thought, how can I contribute to this? In Ireland, we do not talk about abortion at all, you would never, ever, ever say that you had had one. And so I did, I had had one, and I spoke about it. This is actor and writer Tarflin, who fearlessly went public about her abortion well before together for Yass was in full swing. So when it became about my own story and I was no longer an ally, I was the person with the lived experience, it by definition had to become a bit more serious. And yet I did a whole show called "Not a Funny Word" about my experience of traveling for abortion, because although the procedure is not funny, the decision is not funny and a crisis pregnancy is the furthest thing you could possibly get from funny. Hypocrisy is ripe for humor. Hypocrisy around declaring oneself compassionate but wanting coercive control over someone else's autonomy, there's hypocrisy there. And you can puncture some of that and help people process by making them laugh. I guess one of the reasons that people listened when I spoke was because I wasn't lecturing them. I was just telling them what happened to me and every now and again I would make them laugh at my expense. And I think sometimes it's a bit of a cliche, in fact it's a huge cliche, but the spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And when you're discussing very big topics, sometimes simplicity, clarity and a little humor can help just to reach people. So Tara, from your perspective, once together for yes, got into full swing, what was their messaging approach? So how together for yes arrived at their messaging seems to have been along the same lines of marriage equality. I think a lot of the same teams were used, but I know that we couldn't just say it's about love, even though for many of us it was about love and compassion, but they did come up with a great slogan which was, "Care, compassion, change." It's a wonderful positive message, which reinforces the idea that abortion isn't something that everyone would wish they could have in their lives, but it's something that they might need at some point and at that point they need care and compassion and Ireland needed to change. So that was very good messaging, I thought. I would love if they had felt they could be stronger in saying this is an acceptable abortion too. I felt a little bit like there was an unwillingness to frighten what they call middle Ireland, what we all called middle Ireland or official Ireland, but even then the media was going, media and political commentators were going, "Yeah, you're too radical, you're too out there, you'll have to tone it all down." What they meant is they wanted a man in a suit to be saying it, not some lassies, not some husseys. I always say I rep for the husseys. So I feel like we could all have been more confident in reping for the husseys because when the messaging really got going it was like, "Okay, maybe we can't say free-safe legal anymore." And I know that some people in Ireland were going, "No, we've got to really ask for that." And I think that's true. I think if it hadn't been toned down and the free-safe legal message hadn't been put on the back burner, I think our legislation could be further on than it is. And actually I think if we had said, yes, every abortion is necessary. No one has one because they don't need it. I feel we could have had more of that kind of messaging. That's probably coming from a deeply personal place from me. And maybe people would have been frightened by that. But I would always be, I'd be more inclined to state it and say why it's not scary. But if we can take on so many years of shame and stigma and silence and feeling like it was never ever ever going to, we felt so powerless that change was impossible. And we've made some change here. Together for Yass listened and invited people into dialogue. They queued but didn't mandate the behavior they were seeking from voters in an arena where the very crux of the issue is that we can't have external dictates over our personal decisions. The campaign made an affirmative pitch for abortion in values-based language. This stands in contrast to our tendency to argue against restrictions, to focus most closely on horrors and harms. They also told their own story and did their best not to focus on and get stuck rebutting their opposition. Finally, what sets the together for Yass approach apart from what we normally say and try and abortion campaigns is that it created the space for voters to contemplate what would happen if it were them. One of their closing arguments said simply, "A woman you love might need your yes." This shift proved powerful away from a more typical sympathy appeal where we try to make our audiences feel sorry for her, consider her situation and circumstances toward an empathy approach. Think about what would or could happen to you or someone close to you. Remember Sheila, the woman who voted to make the A.F. amendment into law in 1983? Here she is again. Late September 2011, my daughter was used to go to have her 20-week scan. She had her two children she was expecting her third and I was ringing all day long to know how the scan went thinking it was just a matter of course and eventually that night I got a phone call from my younger daughter and I asked her how did the scan go and she said, "Mom not well." And then she told me that they were in having the scan and the girl doing the scan said, "My daughter, I'm having difficulty finding the top of the baby's head." And the doctor said, "We can do nothing for you here. If you want to do something to terminate this pregnancy, you'll have to travel to England to Liverpool." And she, the thought of having to bear this child for another 20 weeks, not knowing how long it was going to live or even die in the womb, she just couldn't face it. And herself and her husband decided to travel to Liverpool in England and have a termination. And then the whole referendum thing was kicking off and we were very, very hesitantly getting speaking about it. And I know there are some people who I would have told and they would have been totally shocked and still are and they couldn't see our point of view at all. It was painful and it was like you felt very lonely and you're not trying to change people. You just want people, let's listen, that's all. Listen and I changed completely insofar as before this preaching but now we must just listen. Let's just listen. And how did you vote in 2018? I voted yes. I'm a not-chinker-osodial. Brave New Words is produced by Western Sound for ASO Communications. Our theme song is somewhere to begin by T.R. Richie. Brave New Words is made possible thanks to support from the Narrative Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to making justice and equity common sense. Learn more at NarrativeInitiative.org. Special thanks to Shavan O'Donohue. To learn more about the people behind together for yes, see photos and view ads, go to BraveNewWordsPod.com. And please subscribe to this podcast, rate it wherever you listen and spread the word. The song is somewhere to begin to search for something worth believing in. If changes are to come, there are things that must be done and a song is somewhere to begin.