In the 19th and 20th centuries, “fallen” or “errant” young women, as they were labeled, were hustled away to the Magdalene Laundries or mother-and-baby homes, which were essentially prisons for unwed mothers run by nuns. As Dan Barry wrote in The Times, many young women were “sent to work, and sometimes die, in guilt-ridden servitude”; hundreds of bodies of young children were discovered in an unmarked grave in Tuam in County Galway, placed there by nuns.
In the 1930s, my grandmother spirited my father’s older brother out of Ballyvaughan in the middle of the night to a nearby village after he impregnated a neighbor. The young woman was sent into exile in America. She put the baby up for adoption in New York and killed herself a year later. My uncle went on to be a landowner, the pride of the village.
In some ways, things have not changed that much.
Women who want to terminate a pregnancy for almost any reason except imminent death still face a Scarlet Letter in the Emerald Isle; they have to leave the country and fly to England if they can afford it (3,265 women went in 2016) or order sketchy pills online and risk a prison sentence.
.. Women who have become pregnant, including victims of rape, we force them to leave the country or risk a prison sentence — that would likely be longer than what the rapist would receive — if they get caught taking the abortion pills.