Abortion Politics and the Law In Ireland

Visual Realignment? The Shifting Terrain of Anti-Abortion Strategies in the Republic of Ireland

The Republic of Ireland’s public referendum on the 8th Amendment, in May 2018, is analyzed as a visual contestation over its previous constitutional and legal restrictions on legal abortion access. I use select visual campaign images, on posters and in social media, to explain how and why this visual contestation is both specific to public debates in the Republic of Ireland and consistent with scholarly analyses of presentations and strategies of visual realignment in other, international contexts. Focussing on visual images used in two specific campaigns to oppose abortion reform, Save the 8th and Love Both, I demonstrate and analyze their intentional shifts away from a previously male-led leadership and public visual expressions of religious (Roman Catholic) viewpoints. However, I highlight the consistency of the campaigns’ retention of the public display of foetal-centric images and expose their distrust of pregnant peoples’ decision-making abilities. I locate these strategies and displays of ongoing visual entrenchment and realignment in the context of Kath Browne’s “heteroactivist organizing” in Ireland that draws on racialized and nationalist visual discourses to oppose the liberalization laws, policies, and their actualization in contemporary post-colonial Ireland.

In the context of Ireland's new legislation governing abortion, I outline and examine the spatial consequences of political decision-making. I argue that Ireland's new abortion law and its clinical guidance permit travel for some pregnant people but impose fixity for others. I analyze the spatial consequences of legal limitations, including non-medically necessary delays and control of medication abortions, that necessitate travel for abortion. I demonstrate how current laws fix some people in place, including diverse migrant populations within Ireland, with no possibilities for abortion-related travel. This critique of the 'new' law demonstrates the Irish state's continued political and medical control of abortion.

Discovering that the Supreme Court of the United States of America, now dominated by an ultra conservative majority of chiefly white men, is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) was not as unexpected as one might imagine. At least, for any woman who has been living in this country for the past decade it was something we could see coming. For those who work at religious institutions or in conscientiously-Christian businesses, the ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) already took away our right to use our health plans to pay for birth control.[1] (This happened to me when I worked at Loyola University New Orleans, a Catholic university). Access to a legal abortion did seem like the next logical provision to disappear.

Ireland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world. Abortion has been criminalised since 1861, and the passage of the 8th Amendment in 1983 introduced ‘the right to life of the unborn’ into the Constitution. The effects of the 8th Amendment are felt on a daily basis by women leaving Ireland for abortion, by pregnant women receiving maternal care, by doctors caring for pregnant women, and by lawyers working for the health service. As predicted by the then-Attorney General Peter Sutherland at the time of the referendum, the 8th Amendment has introduced an uncertain and practically unusable position to Irish law. It has, simply put, become “unliveable”. In late 2014 Labour Women, a branch of the Irish Labour Party, established a Commission for Repeal of the 8th Amendment. That Commission comprised three groups: a political group, a medical group, and a group of legal experts. The authors of this Draft Bill are those legal experts. In the accompanying paper, we first ou...

Ireland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world. Abortion has been criminalised since 1861, and the passage of the 8th Amendment in 1983 introduced ‘the right to life of the unborn’ into the Constitution. The effects of the 8th Amendment are felt on a daily basis by women leaving Ireland for abortion, by pregnant women receiving maternal care, by doctors caring for pregnant women, and by lawyers working for the health service. As predicted by the then-Attorney General Peter Sutherland at the time of the referendum, the 8th Amendment has introduced an uncertain and practically unusable position to Irish law. It has, simply put, become “unliveable”. In late 2014 Labour Women, a branch of the Irish Labour Party, established a Commission for Repeal of the 8th Amendment. That Commission comprised three groups: a political group, a medical group, and a group of legal experts. The authors of this Draft Bill are those legal experts. In the accompanying paper, we first ou...

This model piece of legislation provides for: "An Act to respect human life during pregnancy by affirming pregnant women’s constitutional rights; recognising that sustaining embryonic and foetal life in pregnancy is an important social role, which should be voluntary and consensual, and enabling access to abortion, and in respect of related matters".

The transcript from a Twitter Q&A I did with ABROAD FOR YES--a group that provides networking opportunities for those who might have a problem making it back to Ireland to vote in the repeal the 8th referendum, and those who are in a position to help arrange travel, etc.