HARD-WON abortion rights have been rolled back in Poland and Texas as conservative governments take power across the globe and women in Afghanistan are facing the real prospect of being denied education, a voice in public life or the right to work.

A brutal civil war gave birth to the Irish free state in 1922. The practice of incarcerating pregnant women and girls, subjecting them to hard labour and horrific living conditions was the result of the Catholic Church holding huge power within the newly formed state. Even though the skeletal remains of babies were discovered in Tuam, Co Galway in 1975, it took decades for the full horror of what occurred within the walls of the Irish mother and baby homes to be exposed.

The catastrophic consequences of the alliance between the Irish free state and the Catholic Church would be borne by Irish women and their children. The women who were were sent into the mother and baby homes had little education, few options available to them and many of them were forced to give up their babies once they were born. The wall of silence and secrecy that was constructed by the authorities and allowed to continue without challenge  led to these women and children suffering significant abuse and many died.

The parish priests, always men, were vocal in reinforcing the opposition of the church to contraception and abortion and the government backed them by passing the criminal law amendment act (CLA) 1935 which made the use of contraception a criminal offence. This resulted in large hungry families, women enduring the trauma of multiple unwanted pregnancies and many horrific miscarriages.

There was no NHS so it was not easy for women to get decent maternity or post-natal care in Ireland outside of the church-run charitable institutions. This put unmarried mothers under the direct control of priests and nuns who then decided their fate.

In 1950 the minister for health Dr Noel Browne tried to launch his mother and baby scheme. This scheme had the intention of providing free medical care before, during and after birth and ongoing free healthcare for all children up to the age of 16. He was fiercely opposed by the Catholic Church and forced to resign.

The church questioned the right of the state to be involved in educating mothers or providing them with maternity or gynaecological services. Fear and ignorance were the weapons deployed to ensure the mass obedience of the Irish people and they would not allow their power to be undermined by advances in science, maternity care or by state-run free healthcare.

Strict moral codes and the authoritarian over-policing of women’s sexuality became a daily feature of every Irish woman’s life and this was reinforced from the church pulpit on a Sunday. Even as late as the ’80s it considered morally correct to ensure that all Irish women and girls were ashamed of our bodies and there was an unspoken rule that if women and girls didn’t dress modestly we were inviting trouble. If a man assaulted a woman it was her fault and not his, or if a married man raped a schoolgirl she would be blamed and denounced by all as “a slut.”

It is worth noting that the last Magdalene Laundry was only finally closed in Ireland in the 1990s, so the negative attitudes around women, our bodies and our sexuality prevailed. The mistreatment and aggression shown towards women who did not conform are still within living memory for many of us.

The stigma that was attached to women having sexual relationships or falling pregnant outside of marriage cannot be underestimated — and it lasted decades. Entire communities colluded to shame pregnant women and if they were brave enough to withstand the pressure their children grew up with the shame of being labelled “illegitimate.”

The child would be bullied in school and mistreated by the community. No such treatment was dished out to the father who would get away with denying the child was his. There are cases where women who had fallen pregnant were raped later on and this was condoned by the community because “she deserved it for behaving like a prostitute.”

Desperate Irish women found their own solutions to their nightmare  and it is estimated that between 1980 and 2016 170,000 women and girls with Irish addresses travelled to England for abortions.

The children of unwed mothers were viewed as “little sins” by the priests and  nuns which then allowed for the dehumanisation that paves the way to full-scale abuse. When the final report into the Irish mother and baby homes was published in January of this year it was estimated that over 9,000 or 15 per cent of all children died in 18 Irish mother and baby institutions.

The children died from severe neglect and lack of medical attention if they became unwell. Other children were adopted under a veil of secrecy and they only discovered the truth later in life.

Decades later, the mistreatment of these women continued as they were denied the information they needed to track down the children they had wanted to keep. Many women died or are living out the rest of their lives never knowing what happened to their own children.

What is striking about the outcome of the inquiry into the Irish mother and baby homes is that no individual or institution has been held to account for the crimes that were inflicted on those women. Justice has been denied  to all of the women and children who suffered years of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of the Irish authorities.

This mirrors a pattern we see today as crimes committed against women and girls are still not treated seriously. This is evident in the low level of rape convictions in Britain and the failure to adequately sentence the men who murder women — currently at a rate of one every four days.

Catholic theology prevailed as the only accepted school of thought for decades in Ireland and this was ratified by the state. The teachings of the Book of Leviticus that viewed women and girls through the prism of being impure, unclean and socially inferior to men was followed with fanatical zeal by the bulk of Irish society.

What Irish history shows is that the silencing of women and the psychological and physical violence meted out against us is harmful to everyone as the damage reverberates through generations. When education is denied and ignorance is encouraged and accepted without question or challenge, it is women and children who suffer the most.

When summing up the inquiry into the mother and baby homes Taoiseach Micheal Martin said: “We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy and young mothers and their sons and daughters were forced to pay a terrible price for that dysfunction.”