It was a Father Ted moment. I asked in my local south Dublin pharmacy for a contraceptive item for which I had a doctor’s prescription. “Not in this pharmacy,” said the pharmacist, quivering with indignation.
“Okay, I’ll go somewhere else,” I said. “Do!” said the pharmacist, still quivering. It was 1983 – 10 years since the McGee judgment had ruled that married couples had a right to import contraceptives for their own use and that the law stopping them was unconstitutional. It was four years since Charlie Haughey had brought in his Family Planning Bill, allowing married couples to access contraception with a prescription. But the attitude in some Irish pharmacies, even in supposedly liberal Dublin 4, was still “Down With This Sort of Thing”.
The attitude remained in some quarters that contraception was criminal. Indeed, back in the 1970s, in The Irish Times library, I remember looking for cuttings about contraception to find they were filed under “Crimes sexual” – which was the stark truth at the time. It was a crime to import, sell or advertise contraception.
So it was in that context that Mary “May” McGee, who died this week aged 81, struck a massive blow in the long struggle to release Irish women’s health from the stranglehold of Roman Catholic Church teaching.
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Firstly, with her fisherman husband Shay, she helped to move the debate about contraception away from the area of justice and into the area of health.
She had had four children, two of them twins, between 1968 and 1970. Having been unwell after each of the four pregnancies, May’s advice from her doctor was to use a diaphragm, which required the importation of spermicide jelly. It was when customs seized the imported jelly that the case arose.
The legal battle fought by the McGees ended up in the Supreme Court in 1973. The court accepted their argument that they had a right to contraception on the basis of marital privacy. Senator Mary Robinson, who was back then trying to introduce her own Bill legalising contraception, always stressed how important it was to move the debate away from the criminal justice area and into that of women’s reproductive health and choice. The McGees had done that – never more tellingly than when May’s husband, asked in court how he felt about his wife using contraceptives, said: “I’d prefer to see her using contraceptives than be placing flowers on her grave.”
One of the proofs of that change of culture was that it was Haughey as minister for health who introduced the 1979 Bill limiting contraception to married people with a prescription, and Barry Desmond as minister for health who introduced the 1985 legislation that made contraceptives generally available.
But there was something else important that the McGees had done. They had presented the argument for contraception within the context of a loving, equal relationship. Shay McGee feared not only for his wife’s health but for her life. Anyone who grew up in those families with few gaps between babies had some notion of the stress it brought, particularly to the relationship between wife and husband. Quite apart from the economic implications of providing for so many children, there was the worry for couples of endangering a wife’s health, and for wives the worry that their only control – refusing sex – would be seen as a lack of affection. The inability to have a healthy sexual relationship without fear must have been a massive strain.
The reform the McGees started so bravely came to its full legal fruition in 1985, when Desmond’s Health (Family Planning) (Amendment) Act made contraception, including condoms, widely available and without prescription.
By this stage, the contraception debate had entered a new phase – the need to ensure that people not of the Roman Catholic faith were not saddled with Roman Catholic laws. Garret FitzGerald had already launched a constitutional campaign to make this State more acceptable to non-Catholics here and in the North. When Fianna Fáil’s Haughey, then in opposition, decided to oppose the new Bill, Des O’Malley decided to vote for it. In what has since become known as his “I Stand by the Republic” speech, he said that a democratic republic “should take account of the reasonable views of all groups, including all minorities, because if we do not take into account the rights of minorities here, can we complain if they are not taken into account ... anywhere else?”. O’Malley was thrown out of Fianna Fáil for his pains and went on to found another party, but there are many who will argue that that speech was his finest hour.
As for May and Shay McGee, they helped change a world where so many Irish mothers were expected to spend up to 25 years of their adult lives bearing children. I remember talking about women’s health many years ago to a woman of that older generation who had had more than 10 pregnancies. I was asking her about the menopause, which I was about to face into myself. How did she manage the joint pains, the fatigue, the night sweats, the discomfort, I asked. Was it awful?
“No,” she said. “It was fantastic. I knew I would never be pregnant again.”
Olivia O’Leary is a writer and broadcaster
