Cara Delay. Journal of Modern European History. Volume 17, Issue 3. June 2019.
When Britain and the United States decriminalized abortion in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the repercussions reverberated across the globe. For one small island still struggling with postcolonial identity formation, Anglo-American abortion liberalization posed unique challenges. In the mostly Catholic Republic of Ireland, the Abortion Act in Britain (1967) and Roe v. Wade in the United States (1973) contributed to fears—deeply rooted in historical experiences of colonialism and nationalism—that modernization and secularization would sully Irish womanhood and assault ‘traditional’ Irish culture. Across the next few decades, attempts to protect Ireland and Irishness—defined as Catholic and conservative—from the moral bankruptcy of the modern world characterized national politics and culture. Motherhood and women’s roles became topics of particular contention within this discourse. The 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s showcased intense debates about women’s bodies and reproduction, highlighting the historical connections between Irish women and the Irish nation. No issue at the time caused as much debate and controversy as abortion, which, although illegal in Ireland since the 19th century, led to what Tom Hesketh has called the ‘second partitioning of Ireland’ by the early 1980s.
Historians, political scientists, and feminist scholars have published important syntheses of the debates surrounding abortion in late 20th-century Ireland, including so-called ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ discourses. Few, however, have explored the historical origins of these debates, specifically their connections to gendered colonial and nationalist discourses in Irish history, or the ways in which the discussions of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s linked women’s decision-making capabilities to Irish identity and fear of the ‘other’. Through an analysis of articles and editorials in popular newspapers and periodicals, the publications and correspondence of ‘pro-life’ individuals and organizations, and the experiences and words of abortion-seeking women, this article analyses how and why some anti-abortion individuals and groups rejected the notion that Irish women were independent adults capable of reproductive decision-making.
From 1967, when abortion was decriminalized in Britain, to 1983, when the Eighth Amendment, affirming ‘the right to life of the unborn’, became the law of the land, anti-abortion activists utilized three intertwining themes when making their arguments. In order to assert the evils of abortion, they called upon the historical notion of Irish sacrificial motherhood, depicted Irish abortion-seekers as young, innocent, and vulnerable girls in need of rescuing, and explained abortion as foreign and anti-Irish, coming from a dangerously modern secular world. This modern secular world was most commonly represented by Europe and the European Union, the United States, and especially Ireland’s former colonizer, Britain. The anti-abortion discourse revealed fears of female autonomy, particularly the independence and mobility of younger unmarried women, as well as anxieties that such women would ultimately betray ‘traditional’ Irishness by rejecting their sacred and patriotic roles as mothers, hence threatening the very foundation of Ireland.
Gender and nation in Irish history and culture
References to maternal sacrifice, the vulnerability of ‘girls’, and fear of external pressures in the abortion debates of the late 20th century held specific meaning in Ireland, where these themes referenced a particular colonial and nationalist history. One of the most potent cultural forces in late 20th-century Ireland, motherhood evoked trauma and martyrdom in the past. Rooted in medieval and early modern Catholic traditions coupling suffering with womanhood, Irish notions of motherhood and martyrdom coalesced by the 19th century and particularly during the age of the Great Famine (1845-1852). During the 1840s, suffering mothers appeared in the popular press as evidence of the worst horrors of the Famine. ‘The image par excellence of the horror and injustice of Famine’, writes Patricia Lysaght, ‘is that of a dead mother with a child at her breast’. When post-Famine Irish nationalists talked about ‘Mother Ireland’, they alluded to these representations, linking women’s maternal roles and mothers’ self-sacrifice with emerging national identities.
At the same time, a powerful Marianism overtook much of Catholic Ireland, particularly in the wake of the Virgin’s alleged apparition at Knock, County Mayo in 1879, and continued through most of the 20th century; this, too, popularized the notion of self-sacrificing motherhood as honourable. Irish Marian devotion was a central component of a religious revival that transformed the nation’s culture and had long-lasting effects on women’s lives. In the late 19th century, when Ireland experienced a Catholic renewal and revitalization, known as the ‘devotional revolution’, Catholicism and nationalism intertwined, forging a blueprint for what would become modern Irish cultural identity. Indeed, Catholicism, under siege over centuries of British colonial rule, became, in nationalist dialogues ‘the religion of social and political defiance, of nationhood and patriotic identity …’.
As Irish nationalists worked towards independence from Britain in the late 19th century, gender norms and women’s responsibilities became more politicized. Notably, religious and nationalist authorities underscored motherhood as woman’s only meaningful role. This discourse about motherhood, supported by the powerful devotion to the Virgin Mary, linked women’s reproductive capabilities with national and religious values. A vast Catholic prescriptive literature constructed the Irish mother as sacrificial and martyr-like, subjugating her individual needs and wants to those of the family, community, and nation. As a 1908 exhortation of ‘M.R’. in the popular periodical Irish Monthly illustrates:
May God bless and reward all the millions of good women […] who are at this moment exercising the immense patience and self-denial they must exercise in order to deserve the sacred name of Mother!
Similarly, Catholic writer Nora O’Mahony admonished Irish women in 1913: ‘The true mother has no thought of self: all her life, all her love, are given to her husband and children, and after them, and because of them, to all and everything that have next most need of her’.
As independence movements intensified in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nationalists attempted to rework gendered colonial constructions of Irishness. Within the Irish colonial context, the nation was depicted as feminized, vulnerable to aggressive and violent Irish men, and in need of protection by the British state. C.L. Innes notes that ‘colonial and anti-colonial discourses generally tended to narrow concepts of sexuality and set up a sharp dichotomy between aggressive warrior masculinity and a submissive, passive femininity as the normal gender roles’. Nationalists, however, reframed Irish masculinities, recasting Irish men as the rightful patriarchs and saviours of women and denouncing the colonizing state as the real threat to Irish women and nationhood. These constructions, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert and Louise Ryan explain, classified the Irish woman as ‘custodian of national culture and tradition’, equating her political contributions with nurturing, self-sacrifice, and fundamentally, motherhood.
Of central concern in the identity formation of an independent Ireland was that the country emerge as distinct from its former colonizer. Some nationalists depicted Britain as secular, individualistic, and as dangerously modern. A truly independent Ireland, they maintained, would reject modernity in favour of traditionalism and especially Catholic moral values. That Irish women were responsible for the survival of these religious values was evident. ‘A nation is what women make it’, a Catholic priest wrote in the Cork Examiner in 1922. This was especially true in the case of mothers who ‘reigned within the homestead’. Nationalist interpretations of Irish women as self-denying mothers contrasted with the allegedly modern, independent, suffrage-seeking ‘new women’ across the Irish Sea in England and thus were central to the anti-colonial worldview.
Anxieties in the New Ireland
After independence from Britain in 1922, the new state set about to define itself not only ideologically and culturally but also legislatively. Supported by the Catholic Church, the Irish Free State enforced a culture of domesticity, encouraging marriage and (for married women) childbearing, and focusing its legislation on moral issues, including contraception. The Censorship of Publications Act in 1929 banned information on contraception and abortion and warned that ‘the limitation, the control of births’ may lead to ‘race suicide’. Over the next few years, legislation outlawed the sale and trade of contraceptives themselves; abortion remained illegal under sections 58 and 59 of Britain’s 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. The 1937 Constitution, meanwhile, famously affirmed that a woman’s main national responsibility was motherhood, proclaiming that ‘by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’. The Constitution promised to ‘endeavour to ensure that mothers should not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties within the home’.
While glorifying motherhood, post-independence representations also warned of the dangers facing Irish girls. If they were not careful, Irish girls would never become virtuous mothers and could therefore threaten the future of the nation. Evoking colonial categorizations of women as weak and vulnerable, Irish nationalist and Catholic leaders expressed serious concerns that young, unmarried women were at risk of succumbing to modern threats. These girls, they feared, were easily influenced. Without careful guidance and even surveillance, some would find themselves too attracted to modern vices—popular literature, fashion, dancing, and popular entertainment, including dance halls. In the 1920s and 1930s, members of the Catholic hierarchy commented on the potential that ‘degenerate’ dance halls would corrupt Irish female purity. Periodicals and prescriptive literature, meanwhile, linked new fashions to ‘otherness’, particularly Englishness. Women who were intrigued by such fashions, these publications claimed, were betraying their womanhood and their Irishness by modelling themselves after the modern, independent women of the colonizer. In 1926, the Irish Monthly published an editorial, for example, entitled ‘The New Girl’, in which the author denounced modern girls’ ‘costume, which can only fitly be described as nudity or semi-nudeness’ as immodest. ‘Where are the Catholic women of Ireland?’ the author asked and asserted, ‘[t]he illustrated magazines and daily papers of England are responsible for this […] England is doing far more harm to Ireland today than ever she did in her 700 years of occupancy. What she failed to do by persecution, tyranny, and oppression, she is now accomplishing only too successfully with her Press, her Spirit, and, let me add, her Fashions’.
Popular literature was also deemed dangerous and categorized as modern and foreign. In an age when Irish women’s literacy rates were high and female consumerism was increasing, religious and state leaders viewed secular newspapers and magazines as particularly threatening. Pastoral letters warned of ‘irreligious and immoral literature’ from England, particularly popular fiction that was proving only too attractive to Irish girls and young women. As they constructed this public discourse about dangerous reading, Irish authorities revealed their deep fears that some Irish women might be drawn to the modern world and its associated vices, particularly sexual immorality.
Anxieties that Irish girls would succumb to the pressures of the modern world were exacerbated by the reality of Irish emigration. In the decade from 1926 to 1936, 46,000 women emigrated to Britain, while only 30,000 men did so. Most Irish female emigrants were unmarried and young; about two-third of them were between 15 and 24 years old. Some historians argue that the massive emigration of Irish single women had much more to do with ‘pull’ than with ‘push’ factors—most young women articulated their desire for greater economic opportunities as the main factor in their migration. However, the fact that Irish women persisted in emigrating despite very public appeals for them to remain at home raises the possibility that some were rejecting a stifling culture of control and surveillance in post-independence Ireland.
Nationalists and Catholic Church leaders denounced this massive emigration, arguing that Britain would fundamentally corrupt Ireland’s innocent maidens. ‘Irish young women’, they claimed, ‘would be dazzled by city lights, consumerism, fast living and all sorts of bodily desires’. These temptations, according to Louise Ryan, threatened women’s ‘national identity’ as well as their mortal souls. Ryan concludes, ‘women emigrants were depicted as a double loss in terms of their physical departure from Irish society but also in terms of the potential threat to their Catholicism and Irishness’. Emigrating women, Meaney, O’Dowd and Whelan argue, represented not only ‘modernity and progress’, but also ‘greater personal choices for women’. And women’s emigration continued to be endemic as the decades passed; from 1951 to 1961, over half of all Irish emigrants were female. One woman, who left for America in the 1950s, later recalled: ‘America seemed to be offering the golden opportunities […][to] become a whole person’, suggesting that staying in Ireland did not allow women to become whole. Some of Ireland’s women, then, appeared to be rebuffing their ‘natural’ roles as wives and mothers. Through their agency and mobility, they complicated and even rejected the constructions that characterized them as passive, sacrificial, and contained within the domestic sphere.
In addition to glorifying domestic motherhood and problematizing the agency and mobility of ‘girls’, the leaders of the Irish Free State interpreted sexual vice, including fertility control, ‘as an aberration inflicted on the Irish nation by the twin evils of colonisation and an alien decadent modernity’. Government and religious leaders in the new Ireland feared that sexual immorality, including prostitution, venereal disease, contraception, infanticide, and abortion, were rampant by the 1920s and 1930s, threatening to cause chaos and undermine the new nation. Young, single women were blamed for this immorality. Apparently snubbing the ideal of married domesticity, single women committed transgressions in ways that discomfited authorities. Throughout the 20th century, Maria Luddy notes, unmarried women who became pregnant were ‘forced to hide their pregnancies, abandon their babies, or emigrate to hide their “shame”’. Recently scholars have explored infanticide and shed light on the lives of single women who became pregnant in an age that stigmatized illegitimacy, and in a society that failed to make adequate provisions for single pregnant women and their children. Other work on contraception and abortion affirms the prevalence of such practices throughout Ireland from 1900 to 1950. In response to these sins, the state, in partnership with the Catholic Church, constructed an ‘architecture of containment’, including Magdalen laundries and mother-and-baby homes, that harnessed unmarried women who committed sexual transgressions, especially those who became pregnant outside of marriage. ‘Notably, the moral purity at stake in the project of Irish identity formation’, writes Clara Fischer, ‘was essentially a sexual purity enacted and problematized through women’s bodies’.
Although it would not make its way to the centre of Irish political debates until later in the century, abortion was a reality for Irish women from all different backgrounds in post-independence Ireland. Indeed, Irish courts heard over 30 criminal prosecutions of illegal abortion in the first half of the 20th century. These trials reveal intriguing details about abortion experiences. Women obtained emmenagogues and abortifacients through chemists and via the post. The trade in these objects across Britain and Ireland was particularly robust. Other abortion methods were used as well: surgical methods, syringes, and sea-tangle tents all appear in criminal court records. ‘Backstreet’ surgical abortion networks flourished in Dublin, particularly before the 1967 Abortion Act in Britain, after which most Irish women accessed legal abortion services across the sea.
Scholarly analyses of fertility control, especially abortion, in Irish history remain few. This can be explained, in part, by the difficulty accessing women’s past abortion experiences which rarely make it into the historical record. Moreover, as Leslie Reagan writes, certain feminists, in categorizing women’s past abortion attempts as silent, hidden, desperate, and possibly shameful, have perhaps ‘obscured women’s historical experiences by portraying women as more isolated, helpless, and victimized than they felt’. Yet, evidence in the 20th century demonstrates Irish women’s widespread commitment to fertility control, including abortion; their careful resolve and planning efforts when seeking abortion; a lack of moral judgement or condemnation for such choices; and widespread community support for abortion.
An analysis of women’s voices in 20th-century criminal abortion trials illustrates women’s determination to control their fertility, even in the face of difficult circumstances and the pervasive culture that demanded women embrace motherhood. In 1944, a Dublin woman, K, composed a letter to her lover, discussing her unwanted pregnancy and her desire for an abortion. Her words resist notions of sacrifice and suffering, instead affirming her decision-making capabilities. ‘As I have been feeling desperately ill all week’, she wrote in one letter, ‘I have been wondering whether it would be possible to get the operation done next Sunday afternoon’. Later, K obtained a ‘backstreet’ abortion in Dublin. But the procedure did not go well and she ended up at the Holles Street maternity hospital as an emergency case. Despite an arduous recovery, K did not regret her decision, writing to her lover that ‘everything is successfully over’ and that she had done her part by ‘facing up to it’ as best she could.
Far from embodying notions of weakness and vulnerability, then, Irish women with unwanted pregnancies approached abortion networks with purpose. One man who helped his wife find an abortion practitioner in the early 1940s testified in court that his wife was committed to ending her pregnancy with or without his help, and through any means necessary. Indeed, she took the lead in seeking a termination, even getting a loan from a friend to pay for the procedure. When her husband asked her how she expected to pay back the money, she told him: ‘you needn’t worry about that’, expressing her belief that the abortion was fundamentally her responsibility and that she would manage it independently and competently. Women for whom abortifacients were unsuccessful or who initially were turned away by doctors or others did not stop looking for someone to help them. They persisted.
Over the years, some of the most notorious abortionists in Dublin faced multiple prosecutions, demonstrating the continued need for and popularity of their services. Midwife Mamie Cadden, for example, was brought to court on infant abandonment and abortion charges several times throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Her 1956 murder trial was a watershed moment in Ireland, publicizing the realities of abortion. After Helen O, a married mother of six, was found dead by a local milkman on Hume Street near Mamie Cadden’s Dublin residence in April 1956, a police investigation revealed that Helen had died of an embolism resulting from an illegal abortion. Ultimately found guilty of murder, Cadden was sentenced to death. During her trial, newspapers reported on the chaotic scenes outside the court, where spectators gathered to catch a glimpse of the infamous midwife. Through this very public case, Irish people were forced to confront, albeit reluctantly, the reality that some Irish women, even mothers, attempted to make their own choices about reproduction and were therefore exercising independent decision-making. In response, those who wished to confine Irish women’s roles to marriage and motherhood only intensified their efforts, increasing their rhetoric and underscoring the need to preserve Irish national purity and thus women’s ‘traditional’ roles.
Modernization and foreignness
As the 20th century progressed, changes occurring in Ireland and beyond further disrupted the conservative consensus, causing new worries for those who wished to maintain the fictions of ‘traditional’ Irish culture. Industrialization and urbanization increasingly challenged the nation’s rural identity and threatened to bring with them modern and secular perspectives. Indeed, by the middle of the century, it was clear that attempts to isolate the new Ireland, which Gerard McCann calls an ‘aggressively’ ‘anti-colonial engagement’, were not successful. Modernization threats came from many sources. In 1950, a proposed public maternity care scheme earned the fierce opposition of Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy, who feared that the plan would be ‘interpreted to include provision for birth limitation and abortion’. Meanwhile, despite a pervasive culture that glorified motherhood, birth rates within marriage were declining. In 1911, 596 children were born to every 100 Irish women. By 1961, this number was 416. And by the late 1960s, Ireland faced a new threat: the birth control pill. Although ostensibly it was only prescribed as a cycle-regulator, not a contraceptive, by 1967/1968, over 75% of the more than 15,000 Irish women who were prescribed the pill were using it not for medical reasons but for ‘social’ ones, including economic want and the difficulties women already faced in caring for other children.
Over the next decade, contraception moved to the centre of Irish political life and activism. In May 1971, Irish feminist activists staged a well-publicized protest, known as the ‘Contraceptive Train’. They took the train from Dublin to Belfast, where contraception was legal, and brought birth control pills back to the Republic, deliberately courting arrest. Feminist activism had arrived in Ireland in a public and visible display. As in other places, the second wave feminist movement in Ireland defended women’s rights over their own lives and bodies. During the Contraceptive Train protest, Irish activists affirmed the ‘rights of Irish men and women’ to ‘freedom of conscience’ and ‘the right to control one’s life’. These assertions of female independence, radical at the time, posed serious challenges to the discourse equating woman and mother in Irish culture and history.
Challenges to the consensus, focusing on birth control, continued in the courts. In the early 1970s, a National Commission on the Status of Women came out in support of legalized contraception. Around the same time, several Irish senators, most notably future President Mary Robinson, challenged the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which was the country’s anti-birth control law. Although this challenge proved unsuccessful, in 1973 the Irish Supreme Court heard McGee v. The Attorney General that ultimately paved the way for legalized contraception. After enduring several life-threatening pregnancies, 27-year old Mary McGee had been warned by her physicians not to conceive again. Under the law, however, McGee could not use contraceptives. She took her case to court. Ireland’s Supreme Court ruled that the state’s existing anti-contraception laws interfered with a couple’s right to privacy. The court established the rights of Irish women to privacy in marriage, including, if they chose, the right to import contraceptives. While this ruling only permitted the importation, not the sale of contraceptives, in 1979, selling contraceptives became legal in Ireland.
The movement for the legalization of contraception added fuel to anti-abortion activists’ concerns that modern vices were coming to Ireland—and that abortion would be next. Anti-contraception and anti-abortion activists ‘brandished the motto “contraception now, abortion next”, and began to go round church halls and schools with fetuses in jars’. A representative of The Irish League of Decency cautioned members of the Irish Oireachtas (Parliament) in a 1978 letter: ‘You may consider that the issue of the moment is contraception and that mentioning abortion at all is simply confusing the issue. This is not so. The abortion problem is already here and all that is preventing a more open campaign for legalized abortion is the fact that the sale and advertising of artificial contraceptives has not been legalised’.
Abortion-related developments outside of the island, too, compounded anxieties and marshalled Irish anti-abortion activists in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. When Britain decriminalized abortion in 1967, abortion opponents in Ireland read this as a sign that just across the sea, traditional motherhood had come under siege. Britain was a place dangerously connected to Ireland where many young Irish women continued to settle after emigrating. A 1972 article in the Irish Press accused British doctors of pushing young, unmarried women into abortions. ‘There is enormous evidence now in Britain’, the article claimed, ‘of unmarried mothers being browbeaten for their irresponsibility in pushing up the birth rate, by doctors who ask them to have abortions’. Medicine and male doctors appeared here as alien, modernizing, and colonizing forces. So, too, did medical ‘technology’, most notably contraception. Five years later, the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade in the United States caused additional worries in Ireland where many maintained strong connections with Irish-American emigrant communities. ‘We had thought that Ireland would be different’, Mary Lucey, President of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) noted in the early 1980s. Linking the 1973 McGee and Roe v. Wade cases as overlapping threats to Ireland, Lucey continued: ‘The decision in the McGee case in 1973 [allowing for contraception in some cases] and the simultaneous decision in the Roe v. Wade case in North America in the same year brought us to our senses. From that time on we who were interested in unborn human life knew that we must do something’.
SPUC was only one of a plethora of anti-abortion groups that mobilized in the 1970s and early 1980s. For these groups, Ireland’s growing connections with the increasingly liberal and secular European continent were as worrying as abortion liberalization in the United States. When Ireland joined the European Union in 1973, ‘pro-life’ activists expressed concerns that Ireland would become corrupted by its increasingly close relationship with the more secular European continent. By the 1970s, even other Catholic European countries, including Italy, the Netherlands, and France, had adopted more permissive attitudes towards abortion. Would Ireland be next?
The Catholic Church stepped directly into debates over the moral future of the island. Less than a decade after Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, Irish Bishops warned in a 1975 publication Human Life is Sacred that Ireland’s traditional values were increasingly under siege and affirmed that her people must recognize and defend ‘the absolute rights of unborn life’. Ireland was at a crossroads, Pope John Paul II declared in his 1979 visit to the island. Would it abandon its customs and faith to embrace the modern world? Or would it remain true to the Church and traditional Irishness? ‘Ireland must choose’, the Pope proclaimed at a Mass in Limerick: ‘You, the present generation of Irish people, must decide; your choice must be clear and your decision firm […]. Now is the time of testing for Ireland. This generation is once more a generation of decision. Dear sons and daughters of Ireland, pray, pray not to be led into temptation’. John Paul II went on to speak specifically to abortion, warning: ‘May Ireland never weaken in her witness, before Europe and before the whole world, to the dignity and sacredness of all human life, from conception until death’. Recognizing Ireland as a last bastion of faith and values in ‘the whole world’ and especially Europe, the pontiff’s visit and words fuelled the Irish ‘pro-life’ movement.
In the early 1980s, the battle over abortion in Ireland came to a crisis point over a proposed anti-abortion referendum to the constitution. Although abortion was already criminalized under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, Irish anti-abortion groups wanted to act decisively and pre-emptively to prevent future liberalization or a judicial overturning of the 1861 law. In the words of Denis Barror of the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) in January 1981: ‘A constitutional amendment enacted now prohibiting abortion would forestall and out-manoeuvre anyone thinking of taking such an action’.
During debates over the proposed amendment, exhortations that abortion was a European threat bent on destroying Irishness increased further. Politicians conjured the threat of the European Union undermining traditional Irish values. As Minister for Justice Michael Noonan cautioned in February 1983: ‘a situation might arise where an Irish Government might find itself pressurised by a decision made abroad—in Strasbourg, for example—into introducing legislation to facilitate abortion or, in the alternative, faced with a series of legal actions before the European Court’.
Similarly, legislator Michael Fallon, in the 1983 debates, argued that if Ireland did not amend its constitution, the European Court of Human Rights would task itself with bringing abortion to the island. By creating a conflict between ‘Irish tradition’ and ‘European values’, as Laury Oaks explains, ‘reproduction invokes sensitivities about Irish national identity that are rooted in Ireland’s colonial history and postcolonial present’.
While continental Europe and the United States were dangerous modernizing influences, it was the former colonizer that appeared to pose the biggest threat. As Ruth Fletcher has argued, ‘pro-life’ organizations depicted abortion as a form of colonial violence; as a result, ‘an absolutist “pro-life” stance became a signifier of Irish post-coloniality’. During the campaign for the Eighth Amendment, anti-British rhetoric predominated. In a 1983 letter to the editor of the Irish Press, M. Aitken, National Development Officer for SPUC, outlined the organization’s main goals. SPUC intended ‘to defend Irish women from resorting to abortion in Britain or elsewhere’. Throughout the referendum debate, anti-abortion campaigners linked Britishness with foreign and modern influences, including the media, the medical profession, and capitalism. They denounced counselling centres, clinics, and the entire British medical establishment as responsible for coercing vulnerable Irish women and girls into accepting abortion as an option. Here, too, they employed the notion of foreignness. ‘In England and Wales, where full education in contraceptive technology exists’, Patsy Buckley of SPUC wrote in 1984, ‘it is obvious that these do not reduce the teenage abortion rate—quite the contrary’.
Reminiscent of early 20th-century condemnations of popular literature, anti-abortion activists categorized the British media as a particularly dangerous power that was intent on influencing Irish girls and women. Loretto Browne of SPUC Ireland told the Irish Press in 1982 that ‘there were alien forces at work in Ireland’ hoping to see abortion become a reality. British journalists, Browne claimed, tried to influence Irish abortion laws. ‘We have had enough interference by foreigners in our affairs’, she concluded.
Some anti-abortion individuals and groups in the 1970s and 1980s underscored the notion that foreigners were exploiting Irish abortion-seekers by referring to these women as ‘girls’ no matter their age. In the 1970s, newspapers addressed the problem of the ‘girls in trouble’ who sought abortion. In a 1972 article, the Irish Independent reported that ‘girls’ composed the majority of the over 250 Irish people seeking abortions in Britain that year, including ‘three girls under 11 years of age and 20 under the age of 12’. The Irish Independent in 1976 called abortion-seekers in Britain the ‘unfortunate victims of exploitation’. A year later, an article in the Irish Press maintained that British abortion clinics were luring Irish ‘girls’ across the sea to procure abortions by offering them paid holidays. These ‘girls’ were depicted as vulnerable victims who had been ‘brainwashed’ by others into destroying their pregnancies.
Denunciations of the ‘alien’ ‘foreigners’ who were attempting to force (British, masculine) abortion on (innocent, feminized) Ireland tapped into long-standing colonial discourses that still resonated in the late 20th century. Such nationalist rhetoric was successful. In 1983, Ireland ratified the Eighth Amendment: ‘The state acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to defend and vindicate that right’.
Women’s voices and the realities of abortion
Notwithstanding the best attempts of anti-abortion activists and the Irish Parliament, Irish women continued to travel to Britain to seek abortions. Between 1980 and 2000, at least 80,000 women left Ireland seeking abortion services across the sea. By 2000, at least 20 Irish women left home every day to take what had become known as the ‘abortion trail’ to England. Surveys in the late 1970s and early 1980s found that about 40% of women who sought abortions were above the age of 26, with 25% over age 30. Only 2% were younger than 18. ‘These figures’, explained the Irish Women’s Right to Choose Group that had collected the results, ‘show that the stereotype of the irresponsible teenager who just wants to have fun and get rid of the results is far from the truth’.
Indeed, Irish women who sought abortion frequently did so because of their responsibilities to the children they already had. In all, 68% of women seeking abortion were already mothers. Their desires to be good mothers to their existing children motivated many to seek abortions. ‘I needed all my love, all my energy for Michael’, explained one woman who received an abortion in England in the 1980s and whose existing child had significant disabilities. ‘I was going to make sure he [Michael] got it, even if I had to fight the anti-abortionists to get on the plane’.
Women who reflected on their abortion experiences rejected categorizations of themselves as hapless victims and maternal symbols of a pure Irish nation. Instead, they, like the Irish women who sought ‘backstreet’ abortions in the 1940s and 1950s, proclaimed their abilities to make up their own minds and to act decisively. ‘I do not have any regrets about my decision’, one Irish woman who, in the 1970s as a 19-year-old, had travelled to the United Kingdom for an abortion, noted and concluded: ‘I am a happy person’. Indeed, some women remembered the experience as empowering. Michelle, who travelled the ‘abortion trail’ in the 1970s, reflected years later:
I wish I had never been in that situation, but my abortion is not a burden to me. It’s part of my experience of life, part of who I am. And it was a turning point. I took responsibility for the abortion, and after it, I took responsibility for myself and the children. I never realised I had the strength to do that.
Women rejected the notion that they were ‘girls’ incapable of making decisions about their fertility. They overtly contested the roles prescribed for them, affirming that reproductive decision-making was a central element in their independence. They even appropriated the rhetoric of moral motherhood, asserting that, in some cases, it was abortion that allowed them to be good mothers.
Conclusion
The anti-abortion discourse that developed within the ‘pro-life’ movement in Ireland from 1967 to 1983 was complex and sometimes contested. Most abortion foes followed American and British precedents by asserting that abortion was murder of the innocent. Some, however, also emphasized the vulnerability and weakness of women and girls, glorified sacrificial motherhood, and blamed liberalization in Ireland on foreign influences. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the categorization of abortion-seekers as vulnerable served to reinforce notions of female dependence, to counter ‘pro-choice’ arguments focusing on bodily autonomy and capable decision-making, and to tap into long-held historical representations of the dangers that women could get into when they rejected domesticity and Irish cultural norms.
As this article has argued, the anti-abortion campaign in the late 20th century still articulated that women’s bodies represented the nation. Irish women were depicted as innocent, child-like, innate mothers, or potential mothers whose rejection of their sacred roles threatened Ireland’s moral future, nationalist past, and distinct identity. Ruth Fletcher asserts that ‘post-colonial critique can cast some light on how abortion has become dominantly constructed as antithetical to Irish culture’ and therefore can help explain why until recently, ‘pro-choice’ activism was so rare in Ireland. Even in the early 2000s, according to Laury Oaks, anti-abortion advocates persisted in encouraging girls and women to embrace a ‘‘traditional’ Irish, Catholic culture which privileges motherhood and married family life’.
When the Irish people voted to overturn the Eighth Amendment in May 2018, paving the way for the legalization of abortion, anti-abortion groups reacted as they had done for decades. After Irish legislators voted to support the results of the vote, Dr Ruth Cullen of the Irish Pro-Life Campaign responded: ‘The vote that took place in Dáil Éireann today will be remembered as one of the saddest days in our history as a nation’. Here, discourses about abortion moved beyond issues of foetal rights or individual choice, referencing once more the deep historical connections between motherhood, women’s decision-making, and the notion of Irishness under attack.