Lisa Smyth - Abortion and Nation

The Politics of Reproduction in Contemporary Ireland

Lisa Smyth
Queens University Belfast

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright Lisa Smyth 2005

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Smyth, Lisa
Abortion and nation: the politics of reproduction in
contemporary Ireland
1. Abortion - Political aspects - Ireland 2. Abortion
Government policy - Ireland 3. Abortion - Law and
legislation - Ireland 4. Rape victims - Legal status, laws,
etc. - Ireland 5. Womens rights - Ireland 6. National
characteristics, Irish
I. Title
363.4'6'09417

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smyth, Lisa, 1969
Abortion and nation: the politics of reproduction in contemporary Ireland / by Lisa Smyth.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Abortion--Political aspects--Ireland. 2. Abortion--Law and legislation--Ireland.
3. Rape victims--Legal status, laws, etc.--Ireland. 4. Womens rights--Ireland. 5.
National characteristics, Irish. I. Title.

HQ767.5.I73S69 2005
363.46'09417--dc22

2004027235

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3592-5 (hbk)

I owe a debt of gratitude to the many people who have contributed in one way or another to this project. In particular, I would like to thank Deborah L. Steinberg, whose unwavering enthusiasm, patience and advice have been invaluable over the years. Thanks also to Richard Johnson, Caroline Wright and Louise Ryan for their critical comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript, and to Nickie Charles and Jo Campling for their help with publication. I would also like to thank colleagues in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at Queen's University, Belfast, and in Sociology and Anthropology at Swansea, for their support. I am also grateful to the postgraduate students in Sociology and Women's Studies at Warwick between 1995 and 2000, where most of the work on this book was carried out, especially to Yvonne McKenna, Marsha Henry and Joan Haran.

I would especially like to thank all the campaigners both for and against abortion access in Ireland who agreed to talk to me as part of the research for this book.

I am grateful to the University of Warwick Graduate Award Scheme for financial support in conducting the research. I would also like to thank Trinity College Dublin Library; the British Library; and the British Library of Political and Economic Science for providing access to research material. Sections of are reprinted from Women's Studies International Forum, Vol 25, Issue 3, 'Feminism and Abortion Politics' pp.335-345 (2002) with permission from Elsevier.

Finally, a special thanks to Cillian McBride for all the years of talking, listening and inspiration, and to Ruadhn, whose arrival has taught me at first hand the value of reproductive freedom.

On 12th February 1992, a headline appeared on the front page of the liberal leftwing national newspaper The Irish Times, announcing 'State attempts to stop girl's abortion'. A fourteen-year-old pregnant rape victim, referred to as 'X', had been issued with a temporary High Court injunction, preventing her from obtaining an abortion, and from leaving the State for a period of nine months. The right to life of X's foetus, constitutionally recognized since 1983, was judged to outweigh her own rights to bodily integrity and freedom of movement. The news became the focus of extraordinary public controversy, as mass demonstrations demanding the removal of the injunction became daily events. The State's action, effectively compelling a fourteen-year-old to carry a pregnancy conceived through rape, was greeted with popular outrage. Characterizations of X and her family as respectable, middle-class, and law-abiding were particularly important in generating this public reaction. The significance of what were perceived as the exceptional circumstances of this case has had lasting effect on the abortion debate in Ireland, as journalist Aine McCarthy (2000) comments, and indicated a rupture of previous political affiliations. As the editorial of the same newspaper declared in response to the case, Ireland appeared to have 'descended into cruelty' in a way similar to explicitly undemocratic and tyrannical states.

This book is interested in the effects this case had on the framing of Irish abortion politics, through which a coercive anti-abortion regime had operated legitimately, and with increasing momentum, during the previous decade. More particularly, what follows is concerned with the ways in which anti-abortion politics had operated historically through a politics of national identity, which relied on, and reproduced, constructions of Irishness in traditionally familial, patriarchal, and conservatively Catholic terms. The X case significantly unsettled these gendered

Two specific questions will be addressed in this book, concerning the production and circulation of political culture, key moments in what R. Johnson has described as the 'circuit of [cultural] production' (1995:584). Firstly, in what ways were constructions of an anti-abortion nationhood produced and consequently problematized in popular political culture following the X case? Secondly, how was the crisis over national identity addressed in official discourses, particularly concerning the privileged position of the nation in the republican state? The following discussion will provide an analysis of the production and reproduction of Irish political culture, in its popular and official aspects, in producing and responding to a major crisis. An overarching concern is with the ways in which apparently enduring political discourses can become destablized, as well as reconstructed in relatively new terms in response to political events.