Organizing Towards Reproductive Freedom on the Island of Ireland
Contributors: Maeve O’Brien.
Published
In a country that still struggles against British colonialism towards reunification, catholic-inspired legislation restricting abortion access provides another front for feminists on the island of Ireland. Maeve O’Brien, who has experience of organizing on both sides of the colonial line, describes the many efforts carried out by activists towards reproductive freedom.
One night in May 2022, like heartbeats across the island of Ireland, mobile phones sprang to life with dormant WhatsApp groups jumping to the top of the conversation queues once more. I received one such notification myself, and, blurredly looking at the screen, could feel the exhumation of a collective national rage that had quietened during the COVID-19 pandemic and since the Repeal referendum of 2018.
These messages called reproductive justice activists to action, to once again protest the institutional intertwining of sexual and reproductive healthcare with the Catholic Church. In a plan staggeringly devoid of reflection, it was proposed by the Irish Government that the new National Maternity Hospital (NMH) should be built in Dublin on land rented to the government by the Sisters of Charity, a holy order founded in Ireland in 1815. Offering the government a lease for 299 years, the Catholic Church’s stake in sexual and reproductive healthcare would be felt for generations.
Less than 48 hours later, the issue was trending on Twitter under #MakeNMHOurs, and hundreds of activists and representatives from civic society were standing at the gates of Government Buildings demanding this actions to be ceased: the island was once again abuzz with feminist resistance.
In post-Repeal Ireland, with two-thirds of the country having voted in favor of abortion rights by removing the archaic 1983 Eighth Amendment from the constitution—an amendment that equated the the right to life of the unborn to that of the pregnant person—it was anticipated that change would and should come quickly. However, paternalistic three-day waiting periods, lack of provision (particularly in rural areas), and restrictions post-12 weeks are still forcing pregnant people to travel to England to access abortion services there. So too, in the north of Ireland, the devolved unionist Health Minister Robin Swann has refused to commission abortion services, despite the decriminalization of abortion in this region in 2019. This means that between April 2021 and 2022, 367 people from the island of Ireland made the traumatizing journey to England during a global pandemic to seek an abortion that they should have access to at home.
When we closely examine how the Eighth Amendment was repealed in Ireland, a large share of this victory lies with the organizing structures behind Ireland’s successful 2015 referendum on marriage equality. The generosity of the LGBT+ community in sharing their local, grassroots, bottom-up approach and the overlap between LGBT+ and pro-choice activists made it so that when the time came for pro-choice activists to organize in mid-2017, there was a blueprint for action.
This blueprint, however, was not without its issues, and both campaigns relied heavily on the telling of personal stories to highlight inequalities. We know that in Ireland, the rates of LGBT+ people seeking mental health support spiked after the Marriage Equality referendum, because LGBT+ people had to bear their private stories and appeal to people on doorsteps in order to gain marriage rights. In the case of abortion, the largest pro-repeal campaigning body, Together for Yes (TFY), led a campaign that predominantly focused on the sanitized experiences of white, Republic of Ireland-based, able-bodied, middle-class, and heterosexual cisgender women. Given the large margin of success in the repeal referendum, many key players involved in TFY have retrospectively questioned whether the erasure of marginalized identities was necessary to win.
At its core, however, reproductive justice organizing in Ireland is rapid, versatile, and internationalist.
As an activist, I see our movement as situated within the wider contexts of a global struggle for self-determination. Pro-choice groups here have forged strong links with comrades in Poland and Malta—both countries with a strong Catholic ethos. We also take inspiration from activism in other countries around the world also colonized by the British, such as Sierra Leone and Uganda, whose abortion laws are similarly borne out of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act.
It was never out of the political center that reproductive justice organizing in Ireland sprang. And now in 2022 with the heady victory of Repeal having come and gone and no longer occupying the pages of the media, what is left are the groups and individuals who have been fighting this fight for decades from the margins and whose fingerprints are all over the victory of 2018—despite their mainstream erasure.
It is important to highlight groups like Migrants and Ethnic Minorities for Reproductive Justice (MERJ) who intersect their activism with anti-racism work and seeking an end to Direct Provision—an illegal system used to house asylum seekers in practice in the Republic of Ireland. Following the work of Sistersong in the United States, MERJ have long provided an approach to reproductive justice that focuses on creating safe and sustainable communities; their activism serves as a model for action and inclusion across Ireland. Other direct-action groups have burned brightly for a short while, including the brave Radical Queers Resist—a cohort of queer activists fighting for change through direct action. Radical Queers Resist took the law into their own hands repeatedly during the Repeal referendum and afterwards, using their bodies to stand in front of anti-choice protestors and violent anti-choice imageries, thus protecting the public when the state failed to do so. The work of Radical Queers Resist further shows that Irish reproductive organizing is trans-inclusive at a baseline—an important quality to note given the rise of anti-trans activism within feminist movements in Great Britain.
Key to reproductive justice activism across Ireland is the rejection of social and cultural capital by groups such as Alliance for Choice Derry, who refuse to apply for or accept financial aid from philanthropic trusts or government bodies. Heeding the lessons learned from the stagnant “peacebuilding” sector in the north, which seemingly exists to prop up the status quo; activists in Derry refuse institutional financial aid because they refuse to have their unapologetic pro-abortion message diluted by program goals or donor requirements.
Of course, like TFY, which ceased operation following the 2018 referendum, there are other reproductive justice organizations in Ireland that occupy a centrist position and liaise with government bodies and representatives. Problematically, these larger funded groups often engage in gatekeeping and glean their ideas and practices from the grassroots—refining radical ideas until they become more palatable.
Some argue that this approach must be used to garner meaningful change (though who decides what has meaning is deeply embedded in power structures). But in my experience as an activist in Ireland, north and south, change will not occur, and governments will not act until pushed to do so by boots on the streets.
Considering grassroots groups like Leitrim for Choice (representing an Irish county of just over 32,000 inhabitants), we see how their radical approach often eclipses the efforts of many funded organizations. Not only being key players in the repeal referendum, since their inception, Leitrim for Choice have traveled to Gibraltar to help with the abortion referendum there, published books on the experience of pro-choice activism in Leitrim, and left knitted baby shoes on chapel gates in rural villages across Leitrim as poignant remembrances of the history of the Catholic Church’s abuse of the men, women, and children of Ireland. Leitrim’s work has impacted not only their own community but the national and international stage as well.
During the Repeal referendum, the Irish diaspora in places like Australia, the United States, and the Middle East returned #hometovote in droves to vote for abortion rights, as they did for marriage equality. And yet Irish citizens like myself living in the north were not able to vote in the referendum. Our presence was erased. This was a particularly hard moment in my own activism where I felt powerless and ‘less Irish’ than people who lived a mere 25 miles away from me, across an invisible border.
In the north, pro-choice activism is a cross-community endeavor and includes valiant efforts by British-identifying feminists who look towards London instead of Dublin. While Brexit threatens to create a harder divide between north and south, in my view, it is only through unity that Ireland can achieve reproductive freedom. Currently, abortion has been decriminalized in the north, but there is no access. And in the south there is meager access but no decriminalization. We are each other’s mirror image and it is perhaps only in a united, shared and diverse Ireland and through multiple embodiments of “Irishness” that we can begin to bridge this difference and achieve island-wide reproductive freedom.
Meanwhile in Dublin, the battle to claim the National Maternity Hospital continues to rage. Can we ever trust a Vatican-owned site to permit abortions? To offer health care without interference? Planners and government officials say yes. We know better. ■