Special Issue on Repealing the 8th: Irish Reproductive Activism

Abstract

The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right' (Article 40.3.3, Bunreacht na hÉireann/Constitution of Ireland).The 8th Amendment to insert Article 40.3.3 (detailed above) into the Irish Constitution was passed by referendum on 7 September 1983 and was repealed by referendum on 25 May 2018. For Irish women the campaign to repeal the 8th began the day after the referendum to insert it in 1983 and framed much of feminist activism for the following thirty-five years. While, as legal scholars Máiréad Enright and Fiona de Londras write, at first glance, 'the 8th Amendment may seem innocuous or merely aspirational' it has 'over time … come to ground a nearabsolute prohibition on abortion in Irish law' (Enright and de Londras, 2018: 1). From 1983 to 2018, 'the 8th,' as it was commonly referred to, had a chilling effect on the right to choose, on obstetric care, and access to full reproductive rights for all in Ireland. Over those three and a half decades 'people acting "on behalf of"' the unborn have taken cases to disrupt attempts to access abortion care, while state actors have tried to vindicate the right to life of the 'unborn' by attempting to prevent people from travelling for abortion or imposing unwanted medical interventions on women' (Enright and de Londras, 2018: 2-3). In May 2018, the headlines around the world, reflected, for the most part, the relief felt by feminists and their allies that the 8th would be no more. However, as feminist activist and journalist Una Mullally warned during the post referendum happiness that the 8th was to be removed from the Constitution: 'any analysis that does not place at its centre the feminist, women-led movement is bereft' (Mullally, Irish Times, 1 June 2018). Undoubtedly, she was right. Even as the results of the referendum count began to filter through to the waiting crowd on 26 May 2018, the then Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar of the centre right party Fine Gael, described the poll as the culmination of a 'quiet revolution' that has taken place in Ireland over the past ten years. But this was no quiet revolution nor was it only a decade-long battle, nor had any of the centrist parties campaigned for repeal until the last few months before the referendum. This co-opting of the victory in 2018 by neoliberal centrists is what makes feminist scholarship on the Repeal campaigns, on reproductive rights and on abortion histories in Ireland and globally, so vital.In 1983 the impact of the 8th Amendment was to copper-fasten the idea that Ireland was, and would remain forever, abortion free. For academic and activist Ursula Barry (1988: 59), the insertion of the 8th Amendment was part of the successful attempt by 'right-wing Catholicism' to formulate 'a constitutional amendment asserting foetal rights and [to] look to the State to "vindicate" those rights'. In effect, she saw the battle to ...