Pro-life? The Irish question

2017

Paper written in 2017 (final assessment 'Moral Dilemmas in International Relations'), obtained 9/10.

The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 1992

Irish Historical Studies, 2020

Irish historians and histories of Ireland, north or south, have largely ignored the topic of abortion and so this Pivot series book by Lindsey Earner-Byrne (UCD) and Diane Urquhart (QUB) is a much needed contribution to ongoing contemporary debates. Scholars examining this field are well aware that the historiography on Irish abortion is limited and often contains far more input from sociology, politics, law and medicine. The authors have brought together the majority of the existing, disparate, interdisciplinary, literature and the footnotes alone are worth the cover price of the publication. Anyone seeking to understand this island's 'journey' with abortion will benefit from this book.

This paper analyses the recent Irish abortion referendum, the causes of the overwhelming yes vote and the political significance of its result. (uncorrected Proof version uploaded)

1998

This article asks how Irish abortion law developed to the point of stopping a young pregnant rape victim from travelling abroad to have an abortion in 1992 (Attorney General v. X.). The author argues that this case, which ultimately saw the Irish Supreme Court overturn that decision and recognize the young woman's right to abortion, was the last chapter of the fundamentalist narrative of Irish abortion law. The feminist critique of that law needs to consider its particular fundamentalist aspects in order to clarify the obstacles posed to the struggle for Irish women's reproductive freedom. The author argues that a fundamentalist narrative ordered the post-colonial and patriarchal conditions of Irish society so as to call for the legal recognition of an absolute right to life of the "unborn." The Supreme Court's interpretation of the constitutional right to life of the fetus in three cases during the 1980s is evidence that Irish abortion law was constructed through a fundamentalist narrative until that narrative was rejected in the Supreme Court decision in Attorney General v. X.

Feminist Review, 1998

This paper considers the ways in which discourses of abortion and discourses of national identity were constructed and reproduced through the events of the X case in the Republic of Ireland in 1992. This case involved a state injunction against a 14-year-old rape victim and her parents, to prevent them from obtaining an abortion in Britain. By examining the controversy the case gave rise to in the national press, I will argue that the terms of abortion politics in Ireland shifted from arguments based on rights to arguments centred on national identity, through the questions the X case raised about women's citizenship status, and women's position in relation to the nation and the state. Discourses of national identity and discourses of abortion shifted away from entrenched traditional positions, towards more liberal articulations.

2019

This paper reviews the implications of the abortion referendum in Ireland along with the background that led to the referendum.

Journal of Law and Society, 2001

The Republic of Ireland has become infamous for its legal stance against abortion, especially since it went as far as stopping, albeit temporarily, a young rape victim from travelling abroad for an abortion in 1992. I argue that one of the rationales behind antiabortion law is a post-colonial urge to mark Irishness distinctively by constructing it in exclusively`pro-life' terms. I discuss examples of how Irish colonial experiences have been used to justify the effort to keep Ireland abortion-free, and to resist that effort. Representations of colonial history in the context of Irish abortion law and politics have changed over time and between groups. Such changes indicate a need for post-colonial critique to account for the fragmentation of colonialism as it is displaced, a need which the conceptualization of post-coloniality as a historical object can address.