On 25 May 2018, the Irish electorate went to the ballot box to decide in a referendum how it felt regarding a womanās right to choose what to do with a pregnancy. This was called the Repeal Referendum. The next day a huge crowd, which included myself and several of my friends, had thronged inside the courtyard of Dublin Castle to hear the announcement of the official result. The weather was sunny, the sky cloudless and blue.
A hush rippled through the expectant crowd when the returning officer Mr. Barry Ryan emerged onto the stage and neared the microphone. At approximately 3.30 p.m., Mr. Ryan read out the final tally of votesāand at that a deafening roar went up from those inside the castleās courtyard. It felt like the roar almost shook the courtyard walls, and instantly the atmosphere was that of a party. Some people started dancing. Others embraced. Some wept tears of joy, relief. Others chanted. One woman, I noticed, collapsed in contentment onto the centuries-worn cobbles.
The country, it was clear, had spoken in no uncertain terms: the pro-repeal Yes side had outvoted the anti-repeal No side two-to-one (Connor 2018). The implication now was that the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution would be removed. That Amendment had criminalised abortion in almost all circumstances, meaning that those wanting to end an undesired, unchosen, or unviable pregnancy had to leave the jurisdiction for a termination, or, as they increasingly did in recent years, illegally order abortion pills online (Sheldon 2016).
Later, out on the streets, in the cityās bars and restaurants, and later still in the nightclubs, the party continued as pro-Repeal supporters rejoiced in their hard-earned victory long into the small hours. A night like none other Dublin had ever witnessed.
In the days, weeks and months after the resounding 25 May referendum, there was a lot of discussion of the outcome (Abortion Rights Campaign 2019; Calkin 2020; Enright 2018; Mullally 2018; Scriven 2020). Pundits agreed: the vote was a historic one. Observers seemed to form a consensus: this result was of major import for contemporary Irish society. There was much talk of the end of old Ireland. There was much talk of the beginning of a new Ireland. The truth was probably somewhere in the middle.
In any event, the conclusion I drew from all this was that the referendum itself deserved close analytic attention. And so the immediate impetus behind this project sprang up in the direct aftermath of the 25 May 2018 vote.
But the seeds of it, I believe, actually took root years earlier, something I carried with me as a vague idea for a long time before it crystallised into a fully outlined, concrete book. Allow me to explain.
As far as I can remember my earliest encounter with the issue of abortion was in a philosophy class in university. This was the early 2000s, at National University of Ireland, Galway. I was eighteen, I was taking a first-year bioethics course, and about halfway through the second term the topic of abortion was up for discussion.
Prior to this, most of us were your typical Irish student, reserved, cards held tightly to our chests, fretful of speaking up in front of others. Issues like human cloning, animal rights, gene therapy, organ donation, assisted suicideāall these topics seemed to barely rouse the room, barely drew a glance up at the struggling lecturer.
Not so the week we covered abortion. This week the mood in the room was different. Now the class seemed to be charged, and it seemed to be split too, as those in favour of abortion loudly upbraided those opposed to itāand vice versa. I remember the lecturer, who was from England, had to intervene almost in the manner of a referee on a few occasions, and remind us that we were on a university campus and not a football pitch or a pub. I remember also that he seemed to be amused by us.
I was certainly surprised by the passion that had erupted all of a sudden in our previously sedate classroom. I didnāt speak up that day, though I do remember finding myself more on the pro-choice side of the argument, if it was actual argumentsārather than bundles of sentimentsāpeople presented. I wasnāt entirely clear on what I thought about the whole subject of abortion, but I knew I didnāt think, as some in the room screamed, that terminating a pregnancy was in every circumstance the moral equivalent of murdering an innocent baby.
As an adolescent in rural Ireland in the late 1990s, Iād had close to nothing by way of sex education either in school or at home. I suppose one legacy of growing up in what was still a dominant āCatholic ethosā then in both my family and the community more broadly was to essentially throw a cloud of unknowing over most matters to do with the body, intimacy, desire, sex. Still, by the time I sat down in that university classroom to listen to the various pro- and anti-abortion positions of my fellow students, I knew I didnāt want to become a teenage father. That much was clear. By then Iād experienced enough panicked incidents with my then-girlfriend: split condoms, late periods, occasional visits to occasionally judgemental doctors to ask for the morning-after pill. We barely knew what we were up to, fumbling, clutching, laughing; the culture, as it were, essentially forced us to figure things out for ourselves.
Yet we knew enough to know that life and the world werenāt necessarily cast in two simple varieties of black and white. And during these panicked incidents, we talked. We talked about what we would do. We talked about what our options were. And we agreed. If my girlfriend had become pregnant and she had a child at this juncture in our young lives, it would probably spell the end of both of our third-level studies. We also agreed: what was not a probability but almost a certainty was that becoming parents then would have spelled a life of poverty for the foreseeable future. We had none of the magical thinking that seems to lay behind most pro-life arguments that everything related to do with having a child will just work out in the end. Ours, if you could call it such, was a sort of realist thinking around our parenting prospects at that time.
So, in the event of a pregnancy, we knew what we would do, no question. Iām not sure the language of intentional decision-making is even correct to describe this process, it was more an intuition, an instinct. There was little difficulty involved in these conversations either, little by way of breast beating.
That said, I do understand what people mean when they say that talking about abortion can be difficult. I canāt imagine, for instance, getting into a conversation on the topic with my own mother. For reasons I canāt, or maybe donāt, want to pinpoint, itās just too strange, too uncanny.
But over the years thereās been plenty of other people Iāve had private conversations with about abortion. Iāve had these conversations with male and female friends, with different girlfriends, sometimes with complete strangers. In this we were probably different to older generations, where abortion as a conversational topic was approached, if at all, in a highly coded language of euphemism, elision, silence.
These conversations with friends, partners, strangers have taken a familiar shape. Contraceptive failure. Or no contraception. A late period. Then a test. Then panic. Then a realisation that the principal actors are not long out of childhood themselves, that theyāre too young or too poor or too unprepared for parenthood. And in some cases, this has resulted in the pressing need for a woman Iāve known, in that classic Irish euphemism, āto travelā.
Of these various abortion stories, thereās one that stands out. A few years ago I became friends with a woman. Iāll call her Clare. At some point, I donāt recall exactly how, the subject of abortion came up. Clare told me her own abortion story. Or, as it turned out, her sort of abortion story.
Clare was twenty-six at the time, in a long-term relationship that was beginning to fray. For a range of reasons she was worried that her boyfriend wasnāt going to make a suitable long-term partner. Around the same time she was having these worries, her period was late one month.
She waited, waited. But nothing.
She bought a pregnancy test. The result: blue.
She bought another pregnancy test. Again: blue.
What to do? Clare wondered. Could the relationship work out? Was it feasible at all to become a mother in these circumstances?
Clare told her boyfriend about the positive pregnancy tests. They agreed that the best thing to do would be to get an abortion. They made the arrangements, paid for the procedure. Clare told her family she was visiting a friend in London for the weekend. She flew out alone the night before; her boyfriend couldnāt afford the trip.
Clare checked into a budget hotel close to the clinic. Once alone in the room she grew distressed. She really wasnāt sure if she would go through with the procedure. The question, Am I doing the right thing? kept circling in her mind. She was from a strict Catholic background. Then she began feel...
