This is the deliberate disinformation being spread by Ireland’s No campaign – and why it shouldn’t be believed

With just days left to go before Ireland’s abortion referendum, amid furious campaigning and heightened tensions, there have been claims from both sides that the other is propagating misinformation. The anti-choice group Pro Life Campaign was criticised after posting on Facebook the highly spurious claim that relaxed abortion laws result in more abortions, while pro-choice campaigners are being advised to keep an eye on pro-choice Twitter accounts spouting supposedly misleading and offensive information.

Despite objections from Down Syndrome Ireland, the No campaign has claimed that 90 per cent of babies with the condition in Britain are aborted, with accompanying pictures being plastered on billboards across the country.

While the statistic quoted is correct to a point, it only refers to women who choose to get their pregnancies screened for Down’s syndrome in the first place. Its lack of context means that the 40 per cent of women in Britain who don’t screen their pregnancies are not included. A standalone statistic, free of nuance, without any mention of the wider economic or social issues which play into the reasons why women have abortions, is bound to drive people towards the wrong conclusions. The fear from many pro-choice campaigners directly or indirectly affected by the condition is that people with Down’s syndrome are being exploited in the name of narrowing reproductive rights for women.

Ireland currently has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, meaning that women with unwanted pregnancies have to travel to neighbouring countries and pay for the procedure – buy abortion pills online with the risk of prosecution or seek alternative, often unsafe methods to end the pregnancy. The evidence is clear: making abortions illegal only drives access to them underground and exposes women to dangerous and potentially fatal methods. It is thought that around 67,000 women die each year as a result of trying to get abortions in countries with stricter restrictions on reproductive healthcare.

Both Simon Harris, the health minister, and Leo Varadkar, the taoiseach, have reiterated that in the proposed legislation drafted for the referendum, disability “will not be grounds to end a pregnancy” and that this is one of a number of attempts to “create confusion and muddy the waters” by the No campaign. The sensationalism around claims that Yes campaigners want to “eradicate people with Down’s syndrome” is startling, when it is widely agreed that making abortion illegal does not in itself reduce the number of abortions, so removing and replacing the eighth amendment would not necessarily affect the figure. Furthermore, in the Netherlands, where pre-natal screening has increased by 40 per cent, the number of babies born with Down’s syndrome each year has remained stable.

The Down’s syndrome example is not the only tactic the No campaign have used in a desperate attempt to claw back ground from a Yes campaign that is winning in the pre-vote polls. The No campaign has resorted to age-old anti-choice tactics: creating false links between abortion, depression and cancer. Sponsored Facebook advertisements from an organisation called Good Counsel Network which have been appearing on the newsfeeds of Irish people in the lead-up to 25 May, cite a study from 1980 which experimented on the link between abortion and cancer in rats. In the early stages of the most recent Repeal campaign, an anti-choice group called Yes To Life printed a leaflet which claimed women who had abortions were “30 per cent more likely to experience mental disorder”.

The World Health Organisation has already quashed the myth that terminating pregnancies causes breast cancer and any link between depression and abortion would more likely be the result of the huge stigma around the procedure, in large part due to the anti-choice movement. But why let the uncomfortable truth get in the way of an attempt to continue repressing women’s reproductive rights?

In the final few days of a tense referendum, the hope is that any voters who are currently still undecided pay no heed to emotive hearsay or isolated statistics and instead focus on the facts. Ireland can take 10 steps backwards and vote No, opening the door to prosecutions for possession of abortion pills and more deaths of women in the name of the eighth amendment or it can take a huge leap forward and vote Yes, finally giving the women of Ireland power over their own bodies.