Gender,nation and reproduction in the afterward of repeal and decriminalisation

Abstract

Until 2019, abortion was illegal, with little exception, on both parts of the island of Ireland with the laws dating from the Offences Against the Person Act (1861), a vestige of British colonial law. However, in each country, very different approaches changed the law. In the Republic of Ireland, the process involved a Citizens Assembly, a government committee and a referendum of all citizens. In Northern Ireland, as the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended, the UK government, based in Westminster, introduced new legislation. This study explores how these different processes impacted on how abortion seekers feel about their capacity to access abortion care; being a citizen and how this relates to their sense of belonging in each country, what we are calling reproductive citizenship. We are interested in how legalising abortion on the island of Ireland matters for people's sense of citizenship. Specifically, we are asking how the local availability of abortion matters to abortion seekers sense of belonging and how this shapes their understanding of citizenship. This article sketches out our conceptual framework for Reproductive Citizenship, expanding upon Bryan Turner's initial formulation of reproductive citizenship to encompass abortion.

Introduction

While the presence of the Eighth Amendment in the Irish Constitution and withholding any abortion reform from Northern Ireland had the effect of constructing citizens across the Island as morally anti-abortion, how did the process of repealing the Amendment through referendum in the Republic and decriminalising abortion by Westminster, reframe gender, nation and reproductive politics on the Island as a whole? As this special issue poses the question ‘After the Review – What now for Irish abortion services?’ this paper discusses a second iteration of analysis of qualitative data-capturing experiences of accessing abortion in the Republic of Ireland between 2019 and 2021 alongside qualitative datasets from Northern Ireland to look at abortion experiences on an all-island basis. The article is drawn from the larger Reproductive Citizenship study, an all-island research study looking at abortion on the island of Ireland, bringing together datasets for secondary analysis complemented with primary data collection. The data were analysed using grounded theory theoretical sampling whereby emergent concepts become the focus for a secondary analysis. Addressing what comes after the HRPTA 2018 Review (O'Shea, 2022), this paper takes it cue from concepts encountered in these data addressing wider meanings of regulation and governance of reproduction through regulating abortion. Honing in on these concepts prompted us to draw connections with theoretical constructs of reproductive citizenship proposed by Yuval Davis (1997), Turner (2008), Azoulay (2008), of liveable life proposed by Butler (2015) and of social flesh proposed by Bacchi and Beasley (2002, 2012) and Beasley and Bacchi (2007). Below, we present what we consider as these ‘concepts in excess’ of service user experiences emergent from this second iteration of analysis of the datasets. Methodologically we follow the theoretical sampling procedures of Constructivist Grounded Theory (Conlon et al., 2020) and fill out tentative theoretical concepts abductively directing us to think with this rich data and with theory (Youngblood Jackson and Mazzei, 2011) to suggest conceptual lines of flight on the effects of abortion regulation on the island after the Review.

In this article we firstly introduce the context of abortion on the island of Ireland in relation to gender, reproduction and nation. This section headed Abortion Regulation on Island of Ireland details the similarities and differences to the processes of legalising abortion across the two jurisdictions of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Next, our methodology section headed Observing ‘Concepts In Excess’ of Parameters of Review, outlines what we process as concepts in excess emerging from this iteration of analysis including meanings of abortion being repositioned as an effect of becoming lawful and encompassed within formal healthcare services, offering potential new reproductive capacities, while always simultaneously carrying legacies of previous positionings. We think with these concepts then in the section headed Key Concepts In the Data In Excess of Focus of Review, abductively drawing connections with extant theoretical constructs of reproductive citizenship and ‘social flesh’. This exercise of thinking with theory (Youngblood Jackson and Mazzei, 2011) highlights in particular how abortion is relationally posited within our data. We conclude by offering reproductive citizenship as generative in facilitating conceptualising abortion as lived, relational, embodied or fleshy when mobilised as a reproductive capacity.

Abortion regulation on the Island of Ireland

Abortion in Ireland was highly restricted from the island's colonisation in the era of British rule in the early 1860s. This almost-ban on abortion remained even after the partition of the country in 1921 and was held in stasis even after dramatic liberalisation in Great Britain in 1967 and across the rest of Western Europe soon after. The enhanced role of the Churches influence on both governments, and the focus of the sectarian conflict in the North in the latter half of the twentieth century, prevented progress in areas of social change, in particular relation to gender and sexual politics. Despite the details of the laws north and south diverging in minutiae, the effect of the criminalisation was largely the same in forcing most women and pregnant people into travelling to England for abortions. The abortion travel often came at great financial and personal cost and was so ubiquitous there were common vernacular terms for ‘taking the boat’ and visiting England. The social effect of this enforced exile, without any clemency for even rape, incest, child abuse or severe foetal anomalies, governed women's sexuality in extreme ways. The effects of both the Eighth in the south and the 1861 OAPA that remained in the north, overshadowed each abortion seeker's potential as a full and equal citizen. Whilst the long fought-for changes to the laws deserve celebration, and the access now available offers unprecedented autonomy in Ireland, the stigma of abortion is not solved as swiftly as a piece of legislation.

Co-constructed, unstructured, qualitative empirical data often generates insights and meanings beyond the parameters set for a study. While the remit of the Unplanned Pregnancy and Abortion Care (UnPAC) study focused on how people seeking abortion care navigated and experienced the new Irish abortion care service (Conlon et al. 2022), within their narratives people seeking care also reflected on the changed political and regulatory context wherein abortion was lawful in Ireland. Equally, whilst the all-island Trade Union; Abortion as a Workplace Issue study (Workplace Study) looked at abortion across the island pre-legislative change, it offered insight into how people framed reproductive decisions as within or outside notions of national identity and state responsibility. Legalisation of abortion and the preceding activist campaigns were invoked as establishing a changed set of relations between women and people with reproductive capacities and both States. These changed relations were significant in that they disrupted normative discourses on abortion and on maternal responsibilities. This was exemplified in the narrative of one interviewee who was unaware abortion had been legalised when she became unexpectedly pregnant. She held her position that she would not travel to access abortion outside of the jurisdiction, or even outside her own locality until learning abortion was available in her own locality, upon which she integrated it into her reproductive options. Isabel's narrative portrayed how spatiality matters in providing abortion care with local abortion having an important symbolic effect, signifying abortion as a legitimate, socially and legally-locally endorsed component of reproductive health care.

A second effect of the cultural and symbolic meaning of abortion legalisation encountered in the data evoked a legacy effect of both the Eighth Amendment in the 26 counties of the south and the residual 1861 Offences Against the Person Act (OAPA) in the North. Contestation over abortion rights in the north and south of Ireland anchored in the now defunct previous legal framings of the Eighth Amendment and the OAPA, presented as a residue of symbolic effect in the data, its spectre generating considerable insecurity regarding the certainty of provision of and access to abortion following legalisation. The data illustrated that while the service is now legally provided, it will take time for broader symbolic vestiges of abortion law and politics on the island to dissipate. Time that folds within it experiences, education and training for reproductive health providers, public education, and continually evolving public discourse and regulation. But more hopefully, the data also portrayed how the process of legal change mobilised a reproductive justice sensibility that this paper sets out to locate in wider theoretical frameworks to inform new ways of thinking about our reproductive futures.

This wider conceptualisation of abortion and reproductive rights and politics in the data resonated with how abortion and national identity were theorised through the Eighth Amendment and OAPA while they were in force. Linkages between (anti-)abortion morality politics and national identity as well as with gender, nation and reproductive politics had been drawn out in the literature (Fletcher, 2005; McAvoy, 2016; Smyth, 2005). In the North, the issue of abortion and national identity was often entangled in devolved struggles for national autonomy or even ‘when lives lost in the conflict of NI are conflated with lives lost through abortion’ where by the moralistic framing from some parties was pitched against the spectre of a liberal English position, despite the same parties arguing for no derogation from English law in other areas (Pierson, 2022: 23). Smyth (2005) argued that the framing of the constitution as the centre of ‘people's will’ led the debate around the proposed Eighth Amendment to focus on whether the Irish people were morally for or against abortion. Fletcher (2005) positioned the Irish ban on abortion as ‘nationalist’ and the Eighth Amendment as an instrument ‘[that] represents Irishness as a cultural identity … and is a mechanism for protecting a national resource, people’. (2005: 383). The Irish Constitution fused gender and nation, calcifying women's maternal obligations as her childbearing capabilities and role in the home, thus constituting an ‘acceptable mother’ as one who dutifully reproduced the nation's citizens. (Antosik-Parsons, 2024). Abortion became a bellwether for republican sovereignty, represented by which action would be for the common good, not what would be best for individual Irish women (Smyth, 2005: 73–4).

In the North, the continual framing of abortion as a moral and religious issue that united the country across borders and political divides resulted in it becoming hard to sectarianise abortion as a Unionist or Nationalist issue. Abortion and LGBTQ rights are rare instances of issues that have historically crossed political divides so publicly, in contrast with political party stances on the national question, anti-abortion legislation in particular was seen as a common bond shared across the island, holding the potential to imagine a shared future, further cementing the idea of the whole island as morally different to England. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), known for their rigid adherence to British rule and British law, hypocritically have used abortion to avow principles of shared consent with their historical opposition, Irish Nationalists: ‘People ask what a shared future looks like, and I point to this moment of an SDLP, DUP and Ulster Unionist bringing forward proposed legislation related to the most basic of human rights: the right to life.’ (Paul Givan, DUP, quoted in Hansard, 2013: 9) This was despite an estimated 6000 people a year travelling to have Irish abortions in England. The Eighth Amendment in its framing positioned foetal right to life as equal to the right to life of women (Bloomer and O’Dowd, 2014) had the effect of diminishing Irish women's rights in favour of the ‘common good’ of the Irish nation (Smyth, 2005). Echoing the wording of the Eighth Amendment, those campaigning against repeal used the slogan of ‘Love Both’, drawing on Irish law and discourse to again centre the foetus as equal to its mother. In contrast, the Together for Yes campaign focused on change, care, and compassion. The outcome of the referendum resulted in successful feminist vote for constitutional change (Fletcher, 2018). In Northern Ireland, anti-abortion MLAs often pitted pregnant people directly against the ‘vulnerable’ foetus, conjuring the spectre of the United Kingdom's wombs as the ‘most dangerous place for a child’ (Bell, quoted in Pierson, 2022: 23). Yet, the 2018 United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (UN CEDAW) inquiry interviewed the whole political spectrum and some people directly impacted by the OAPA, detailing how dangerous the lack of abortion healthcare in Northern Ireland was for those who didn’t have the financial means to travel to England. The inquiry was invoked by a coalition of feminists and NGOs in the North as evidence of the continued contravening of human rights, demonstrating the danger posed to women and pregnant people in Northern Ireland.

With the general will of the Irish people now codifying abortion provision in the constitution, the question arises as to whether limitations to full realisation of democratic citizenship and human rights for women persist even within this new reproduction and abortion policy. While the Irish constitution was the mechanism through which abortion was both prohibited and permitted through a democratic strategy, there is a natural comparative point here for Northern Ireland, where the OAPA was changed, not by a public vote, but through the mechanisms of the state party duty-bound to protect human rights even with devolution arrangements, the UK Parliament at Westminster. Whilst the UK Parliament, was loath to bypass the principle of devolution, it was much harder to avoid responsibility when the Northern Ireland Assembly had been suspended for so long, leaving rights bearers no other option for redress. Whilst the specific mechanism for achieving decriminalisation has been contested by those opposed to the outcome, the need for change was long established, from multiple sources, including a lengthy activist campaign, court cases, public opinion polls, a UN led international inquiry, and a UK Parliamentary Committee national inquiry (Bloomer and Campbell, 2022a, 2022b). Strong opposition to change was evident within the Northern Ireland Assembly (though this lessened over time in all bar one party), government departments, the main churches and a vocal anti-abortion lobby, as a result anti-abortion norms dominate public space. Though datasets post reform in Northern Ireland were not yet in existence, studies such as the Workplace Study, captured experiences of accessing abortion and positioning of abortion in pre-legal change in both jurisdictions. In this latter study themes of silencing and stigma prevailed with resistance to both observed by participants through ongoing campaigns for change on the island (Bloomer et al., 2023).

Methodology (Observing ‘concepts in excess’ of parameters of review)

While the parameters of the UnPAC commissioned research focused on navigating and experiences of the abortion care services, the data generated with people seeking abortion care in Ireland in the immediate wake of Repeal and legal change was saturated with what we consider ‘concepts in excess’ of those parameters. The excess included the meanings of abortion being repositioned as lawful and encompassed within healthcare services, offering potential new reproductive capacities, while always simultaneously carrying legacies of previous positionings. In particular, the ways in which previous positions of abortions signified ideas about gender, nation, and morality were evidence of such enduring legacies.

While law reform can instantaneously reposition the status of abortion through legal frameworks, the UnPAC data portrayed how the meaning of abortion, and people who integrate abortion into their reproductive biographies, are not capable of being so instantaneously re-signified. Legal reform on the Island happened in a shared temporal space but through contrasting processes. It involved participatory democracy including a Citizen's Assembly and Referendum in the Republic (Taylor et al., 2020) while in Northern Ireland reproductive rights activists had mobilised support to extend legal provision for abortion in Westminster while the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended (Campbell, 2022). Women's narratives of abortion care experiences in the UnPAC study situated their care experiences in wider cultural, political and social discourses and meanings that evoked what we are calling an ‘excessive’ dimension regarding how the process of legal change that brought local abortion care provision into being related to their embodied selves with reproductive capacities. We tentatively heard this as invoking concepts of belonging, mattering, liveable lives, collectivism, solidarity, relationality and sought to carve out a space and framework to draw out these concepts. To briefly outline these concepts: Belonging was invoked in the sense that in having legal access to abortion the country in which they lived, and in their own locality, abortion seekers saw themselves as having access to full citizenship. Mattering meant that abortion seekers perceived their lives as mattering to the State beyond their perceived duties to reproduce the nation and their reproductive capabilities. Liveable lives were invoked in relation to the sense that access to abortion meant could now make decisions around their reproductive capabilities in a context where abortion was legal and therefore recognised as a condition for a liveable life. Collectivism surfaced in accounts where they could imagine themselves as part of a community of abortion seekers. This also suggested solidarity whereby they used their own experiences to help people in more difficult situations than their own. Relationality meant that they saw themselves as not having an abortion in isolation but rather that was a part of a wider social construct.

The opportunity to engage with these ‘concepts in excess of’ arose with the opening of a project call by the Higher Education Authority funding all-island focused research. Aware that watershed legal change to the status of abortion had happened contemporaneously on both parts of the island, but through very different processes, we set out to harness the opportunity to hone in on how people seeking abortion portrayed the significance of legal reform and the activism that brought it into being. The authors came together to forge an all-island research team bringing together datasets for secondary analysis that would be complemented with primary data collection as well.

The first phase of the project involved secondary data analysis of three datasets: UnPAC dataset of 58 interviews with people (all women) from RoI who have used abortion services there since legalisation, Workplace Study (Ireland and Northern Ireland), and My Body My Life (Northern Ireland, extracted from the UK dataset). The data were analysed following grounded theory principles of theoretical sampling wherein key concepts and processes of interest emergent from the dataset become the focus for dedicated iteration of analysis honing in to ask how this is featuring across the empirical dataset. This process involved deep, repeated readings of the dataset by the research team. The analysis presented below illuminates concepts in excess of the focus of the HRPTA 2018 Review (O'Shea 2022) emergent from the data followed by a discussion proposing key theoretical frameworks mobilised by these concepts. (Analysis using remaining datasets, Workplace Study, My Body My Life, will be reported on in later publications).

Key concepts in the data in excess of focus of review

To illuminate the ‘concepts in excess’ identified in the data we present analysis of a number of cases, set out in the format which allows the whole person often fragmented in qualitative data analysis to be present. These narratives helped us to identify key themes of Belonging, Mattering, Liveable lives, Collectivism, Solidarity and Relationality as discussed earlier. This is followed by a discussion proposing key theoretical frameworks mobilised by these concepts emerging from our data.

Isabel

Isabel was a mother of a larger than average size family from a rural part of Ireland. When she learned of her unexpected pregnancy, she reflected very deeply on it and what it meant for her future. She felt very conflicted as she was content with her family as it was. Understanding the demands of maternal labour, and having transitioned out of the infant years with her children she felt I cannot go back to this, I really don’t want to go back to this stage. Her family was at the stage where they were school-going age, they had moved past the schedule of naps, they could put on their own seat belts. Isabel labelled these as small things, but they demonstrated to her a level of self-sufficiency on the part of the children. She recognised that dealing with a new infant would take away what she had gained in terms of her sense of self within the last couple of years, whereas she was just getting back a little time during the day to focus on her own needs. Yet, abortion was not in her frame of reference: to be honest with you when I found out I was pregnant like honestly abortion never entered my head.

Isabel very much fit within the parameters of the traditional, heterosexual expectations of women in the national imaginary, (women's place in the home and as bearer of the nation), yet she dared to imagine something for herself. She acknowledged the division of labour as traditionally gendered in her household, with the majority of the child-rearing tasks falling to her. Yet when talking with her husband, who is equally reflective that their family is in a good place and they have begun transitioning out of the demands of early childhood, he told her that abortion was now legal in Ireland. Knowing nothing about abortion care provision in Ireland she was very clear that she wouldn’t travel to access it:

I thought you'd definitely have to go to Belfast or Dublin. I don’t know, I didn’t know, I knew absolutely no information, none, none. So, he googled it then and there was a number there I can’t even remember it, but anyway MyOptions came up on it and so I rang this number. I presumed it was like a national number and it explained to me that I could ring this number and it's a number that is in your area, near your area.

But when Isabel realised that it was indeed available in her county, in her area, this shifted her relationship to abortion. The local availability of abortion signalled to Isabel that this was an option that she could now consider as part of her reproductive life. If abortion was offered in a rural location, like where she lived, it was a legitimised option for people in those communities. Isabel never thought she would need an abortion and in fact had voted no to Repealing the Eighth Amendment. She began to integrate abortion as an option for this pregnancy.

As a woman with previous pregnancies she was well aware of the bodily changes that would betray her as pregnant to friends and family, and this was particularly troubling when she was not yet ready to formally acknowledge or decide what to do with the pregnancy.

‘we had one or two family occasions and like … I was getting conscious that I was … putting on weight and I knew … people would guess like’.

Isabel was very conscious of the demands of reproductive and maternal labour, and reflecting on her unintended pregnancy, she recognised the toll it would take on her at this life stage as her children were transitioning into a different stage of childhood development.

Oh exhausting, like that you know going back to getting up at night and I know it's very selfish, and obviously because I'm a stay-at-home person I obviously got up and … It was just, it was my job. And just I didn’t think I could go back to that again at night honestly, I just really couldn't. I couldn't, I don’t think I could go back to the small feeds again.

I don’t know if it was because I was older, I just was like I was exhausted, already like, you know, I was only whatever amount of weeks and I was just, I was like “oh my god I really can’t go through another nine months of this.

Isabel's case reveals the process of integrating abortion into her reproductive biography through learning of its legalisation alongside a realisation of pregnancy that generated for her a sense of the limits to her capacity for reproductive labour. Retaining the pregnancy as something known only to herself and her partner was critical to allowing her mobilise this new reproductive possibility which would be repositioned if it became a knowledge shared with wider family and social circles. But a key dimension necessary for abortion to become a reproductive capacity for Isabel was that it would be local to her, a capacity envisaged for her immediate peer group that would not have the effect of displacing her from her own community. Belonging through local abortion provision is invoked in Isabel's narrative.

Laoise

I have to think about myself and my mental health

Laoise was a mother who voted yes for the legalisation of abortion in Ireland. While she was aware that the law had changed, she knew nothing about the abortion care service. Laoise demonstrated an awareness that she wanted to give herself permission to put her own needs first, prioritising herself and her mental health over another pregnancy. She was clear in the knowledge that she knew her own capabilities and limitations and recognised that another child was not in her best interest. However, Laoise did not initially see herself as deserving of an abortion, because she didn’t think she fitted the criteria of someone who needs an abortion.

When Laoise attended her local doctor, who was not an abortion provider, the doctor observed how upset Laoise was by the pregnancy and told her:

you do have options here and it was when she said it to me, the relief that came over me.

The doctor legitimises abortion as a potential option for Laoise when the doctor explained:

nobody is judging you here. I understand your situation, I understand all the reasons that you’ve given me, she said termination, abortions are not your typical stereotype 16, 17, 18 year old, she said most of the women that come in here to me are in their late 30s, over 40. And she said they have children, they have just made the decision, just like you here today and you are not a bad person for thinking this or wanting to do it.

The doctor destigmatised and normalised abortion by framing it as a normal part of reproductive healthcare, one that was available to all women of reproductive age, regardless of their circumstances. While this doctor was not an abortion care provider, the doctor did enable Laoise integrate abortion as reproductive healthcare as a possibility for her as they signposted it in response to witnessing the distress this realisation of pregnancy generated in her.

Hazel

Hazel was a lone parent who was aware abortion had been legalised but knew nothing about provision. In contrast to Isabel and Laoise, Hazel had integrated abortion as within her reproductive capacities through her awareness of the law changing during the time when it was on the political agenda. When she became unexpectedly pregnant while using contraception she attended her own doctor, who she knew wasn’t a provider, with the expectation that the doctor would signpost information on the abortion care service. Hazel describes herself as ‘gobsmacked’ that the doctor knew nothing about the service and did not even have a leaflet with information for her.

It was like a slap in the face was the GP having nothing. … You feel like you’re out on your own. … Yeah you know I felt like well if medical persons don’t know, how the heck am I meant to find out.  

When Hazel described the lack of abortion information from her doctor, she called it ‘a slap in the face’, a very physical and embodied description. Hazel was frustrated by a wilful ignorance that not only de-legitimises the abortion care service but also devalues women's healthcare. Hazel asks the question: if medical professionals don’t know how to access abortion in the Republic of Ireland, and don’t refer people on to abortion services, how is the average person going to find out or access abortion?

Despite this initial set back, Hazel connects with the abortion care service and attends an abortion provider. Reflecting on the local provision she accessed she said: ‘… once you got [the information] and you knew that you could get in your car … to a place in your own county, like that was just amazing’.

Discussing the arrangements she needed for a medical abortion which included two medical consultations, with a three-day waiting period in between, Hazel had a trusted friend take care of her child while she attended the appointment, meaning that Hazel could focus her attention on her abortion care.

I was just saying […] I can’t tell anybody where I’m going, not that I couldn’t but I didn’t want to. … And then it was like well do you know my daughter comes everywhere with me, why isn’t she coming now. So I just got a friend, you know who actually went through it with me, you know helped me along the way, so she had known everything.

For Hazel, her own awareness of the changed legal status of abortion mobilised her to seek it out within the healthcare arena when her own GP did not transpire to have the engaged with this component of reproductive healthcare to support her in doing so. To realise this reproductive capacity entailed Hazel bringing a close friend into the process with her while mindful she did not want any others to know of her abortion.

Serena

Serena was a mother of two who had experienced two previous difficult births before becoming unexpectedly pregnancy. She considered: ‘My health, like my pregnancies definitely hold a lot of trauma in my body.’ Serena knew that abortion was legal in Ireland, she ‘felt very strongly that abortion should be made legal here. But controversially I would have always said I would never have one but I think everyone should have the choice.’ She expected that her own doctor would provide abortion when she attended and was ‘shocked because she's very forward thinking and she's very normal, you know she has children herself and [I] would have a really good relationship with her.’ Serena describes:

that was a surprise to me, you know that my GP didn’t offer it, I suppose maybe I was quite naïve, I just kind of assumed since its legal now that like you know that its provided, so that was a bit, yeah.[…]

The local availability of abortion mattered to Serena particularly when she reflected on the reason her doctor gave her for not providing. Serena said:

[The doctor] said that [they] provide medical care for a local religious organisation and that [they] had been approached by a number of members of the religious organisation not to provide the service because […] your name is published if you are a provider. And basically [the doctor] just said that [they] just doesn’t provide it, that's the reason that [they] told me …

Asked what she thought of that reason, Serena responded:

Well it sounded utterly ridiculous but equally, like in the town […] it wouldn’t be uncommon to pass people promoting, even particularly around the time of the vote in relation to the Eighthth Amendment, like there was a lot of people picketing outside the churches and stuff, you know that we should vote no and all that. So yeah I suppose I thought it was ridiculous, I thought, to me I felt well if I was a GP like that that wouldn’t change my decision but then like that's easy for me to say, I’m not a GP so.

Reflecting on her own doctor's rationale for not providing abortion, Serena acknowledges that within her own community there appeared to be a well-organised group of people opposing abortion and it was because of their visibility at the time of the referendum and their links with the local religious community that her doctor did not provide. Despite not providing abortion, Serena's doctor refers her on to a providing doctor within her county and provides her with aftercare.

Consequently, the nearest provider was nearly an hour away by car. When Serena reflected on the travel logistics required to attend the closest provider she thought:

in the town that's local to me, there's like, like any town but there's lots of different socioeconomic status and I just did think of how … if I was not able to afford to get there and there's like no public transport link, like there probably is but like I mean you know you’d be talking about maybe getting a bus at 7 in the morning and having to wait around till 7 in the evening. […] And like it was just so astounding to me and I suppose I realised then how lucky we were that actually this was an option to us. Because for that simple logistical reason it might just not be an option then to a lot of people.

When Serena describes the logistics of the medical abortion, she highlights intersecting concerns:

I think it was 2 or 3pm because its 24 hours after the first one and then he had said to me it would be 4 to 6 hours that it would kick in. So I had said to my partner like it was extremely likely that it could mostly happen in the night time of the Tuesday when the kids were in bed. But like in case the children weren’t in bed, you know or in case it happened earlier he finished work a half day that day and he collected the kids from school and I like had the dinner, this sounds so mundane, like you know but I had their dinners ready and actually like that was obviously the right thing to do because in the beginning, like the pain was extremely, do you know what on reflection it probably wasn’t unmanageable, it was just so emotional, like there was a lot more than just you know the pain I suppose.

Serena's description here is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, Serena details the passage and management of time during the day. She considers how she manages reproductive labour and attends to the intersecting responsibilities and timelines of childcare and the abortion experience. She also articulates the emotional labour of an abortion whilst parenting and managing their own emotional wellbeing in order to parent. In being prepared, Serena explained ‘I just I took time off work and kind of tried to keep things normal for the kids and probably for myself’. Even with a supportive partner, the management of the abortion experience carries additional responsibilities. When reflecting on rights and responsibilities these are not portrayed as distributed evenly amongst genders. Brie echoed Serena's emphasis on intersecting forms of reproductive labour when it includes self-managing abortion:

So how does a woman pass this while she has children or a child and there's homework that needs to be done, there's dinners that need to be made. Do you know what I mean, they need to be washed for school the next day. How does she have an abortion and be a mother at the same time.

For Brie, consideration of what makes for an inclusive abortion service is one that calibrates the abortion method offered to the situation of the person seeking abortion:

I had a lot of thought about it. I’d like to hear on a woman that has no help, and how the hell did she go through [self-managed abortion]. And then the likes of a sexual abuse case, or a rape case and see how did she feel in them three days? Or how did she cope because I just don’t agree with that. I think … the way to define them would be to go in and the doctors ask … certain questions to know right, what type of abortion you are going to have. You’re going to have a home abortion because you just don’t want it. Well, you’re having a, I’m going to refer you to [hospital] because you had a sexual abuse case and I don’t feel like you, mental health wise you should have to go through these next few days.

Discussion

In thinking with the ideas signified in the data of the people whose cases are summarised above, we abductively drew connections with theoretical constructs of reproductive citizenship proposed by Yuval Davis (1997), Turner (2008), Azoulay (2008) and Butler (2015) and also with the concept of Social Flesh proposed by Beasley and Bacchi (2007). We outline these perspectives first and then go on to discuss them in relation to the data presented above.

A core concept surfacing through this data related to belonging, which we connected with theories of Citizenship. This is evident in Isabel's account who is able to incorporate abortion as a reproductive choice now that she knows it is available in her local, rural area. In Gender and Nation (1997) Yuval-Davis argues that citizenship is a multi-tier construction. Noting how original constructions of citizenship were developed along the active/passive and public/private axis, Yuval-Davis followed Walby (1994) in criticising a duality in how meanings of private play out as both individual autonomy and freedom from state intervention with differential gendered effects. For Yuval-Davis (1997) it is important to recognise that the family (private) is not necessarily an autonomous and free space for women. Different social positionings within the family mean that different people have different access to power. Reproduction often locates women's belonging as primarily in the private sphere, and in the context of the island of Ireland, Enright (2017) argues that motherhood is constructed in a way that makes it ‘incompatible with other social and political roles’ (p. 43). Consequently, the public spaces of law-making and nation-making have been appropriated by men, occluding women's participation in public life by either removing them from the public sphere or excluding their voices within the law (p. 43–44). Yuval-Davis proposes that it is useful instead to distinguish three spheres in which autonomy can operate: State, Civil Society and the Domain of family and kinship relations and we are reminded that ‘people are not positioned equally within their collectivities and states, collectivities are not positioned equally within the state and internationally, and states are not positioned equally to other states.’ (1997: 91).

Turner proposed the term ‘Reproductive Citizenship’ (2008) as concerned with issues of ‘with whom one may reproduce and under what social and legal conditions’ and involving ‘primarily the rights and duties of parenting’. For Turner ‘reproductive citizenship’ recognises the state's interest in population within the framework of governmentality and he argues that state-building, nationalism, and reproductive citizenship are necessary connections of reproduction, supported by traditional ideologies of patriarchy (Turner, 2008: 53). For Roseneil et al. (2013), there are a myriad of ways in which the state regulates and shapes the reproduction of their citizens. Drawing on bodily and intimate citizenship they argue that ‘historical and contemporary configuration of European citizenship, and [...] the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion/marginalisation [...] are integral to the promulgation of the procreative norm’ (p. 6–7) coalescing as reproductive citizenship. Smyth (2024) identifies reproductive citizenship as: ‘the ongoing, contested process to realize every individual's freedom to make decisions about their sexual and reproductive lives, and to have those decisions respected and facilitated’, arguing such a conceptual framing can identify and respond to injustices (Smyth, 2024: 197).

These important articulations of the effect of governmentality of reproduction on citizenship start from the vantage point of state actions, practices and effects but as Roseneil et al. (2013) argue ‘the biological, sexual and technological realities of natality, and the social realities of the intimate intergenerational material and affective labour that is generative of citizens, and that serve to reproduce membership of, and belonging to, states, nations, societies and, thus of ‘citizenship’ itself, have largely remained marginal’ (p. 90). It is these micro level realities, material and affective labour generative of belonging that our data illuminates.

In seeking out a theoretical framework that engages citizenship at this level of materiality, we note Beasley and Bacchi's (2000, 2002, 2007, 2012) concept of Social Flesh referring to the ‘lived, fleshly, social intersubjectivity’ that aims to draw attention to the shared human reliance on social space, infrastructure and resources (Bacchi and Beasley, 2002: 325). It highlights failure in theoretical accounts of citizenship to give attention to the place of bodies given how ‘citizenship is constituted largely as a public activity concerned with establishing and monitoring boundaries between people and between groups of people [whereas] the body, by contrast, is generally constituted in singular terms and as quintessentially private’. (Bacchi and Beasley, 2002: 328). In most accounts of citizenship, the body is posited as the terrain of public regulation disconnected from the experiential, lived body and is subsequently disconnected from subjectivity itself for corporeal experiences are central to subjectivity (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 343). They emphasise the interconnected nature of corporeality – bodily materiality is produced and lived precisely in relation to other bodies in ways out of which citizenship simultaneously emerges. This fleshly, social intersubjectivity is a form of citizenship formation present in this dataset where reproductive citizenship appears as relational, embodied and emergent. Formations of reproductive citizenship observed in the analysis above such as Serena and Brie's accounts of the embodied aspects of managing the medical abortion while also parenting. When Hazel attempts to mobilise her reproductive citizenship, her description of the impact of her doctor's ignorance of the abortion care service articulates this as an embodied effect ‘like a slap in the face.’

Similar to Hermannsdóttir and Dybbroe's (2023: 1033) study of the Faroe Islands, where abortion is restricted, our findings illustrate how ‘women's reproductive citizenship and sense of belonging are still contested and negotiated within physical borders’. Hazel was faced with a GP unwilling to provide abortion and unwilling to provide information on accessing services; Serena had to deal with a GP unwilling to provide abortions but willing to provide information. Serena is fully cognisant of the implication of her GP's decision – she has the means to travel outside of her locale to get an abortion but not all abortion seekers would be able to do so easily.

Spatiality of abortion mattered to Isabel for whom abortion as a component of reproductive capacities could only be realised if she could access care within her own locality and community. Reproductive citizenship featured in Laoise's case in how her GP working to destigmatise and normalise abortion framed it as a normal part of reproductive healthcare, available to all women of reproductive age, regardless of their circumstances. Although not an abortion care provider themself this doctor signposted Laoise's options to include newly legalised abortion, and in doing so mobilised her capacity to terminate her pregnancy constitutive of reproductive citizenship.

Hazel's account demonstrates an aspect of reproductive citizenship for abortion seekers with children – they must have the assurances that resources can be mobilised to care for one's existing children to allow a pregnant mother step away from this component of their reproductive labour and attend to the aborting body. This highlights the intersecting responsibilities, and timelines, of childcare and the abortion experience. And this in turn reveals another facet of reproductive citizenship – the multi-dimensional support systems abortion seekers must mobilise in order to have an abortion and the idea that abortion seekers who have children are already engaging in reproductive citizenship (in the Turner sense) when they need to mobilise it in a different direction.

Social flesh, time and reproductive citizenship intersect when abortion seekers discuss their embodied sense of the developing pregnancy, their desire not to let the pregnancy advance any further and the fear or restrictive nature of the hard deadline of twelve weeks gestation for lawful abortion. All abortion seekers know exceeding the deadline means not being able to access care at home and facing having to travel abroad for this reproductive capacity, a rupture to reproductive citizenship.

I felt like I was waiting all this time and doing nothing and the pregnancy was developing. Like I know only by days […] I needed to just, just stop it like you know. (Serena)

Time passing in a pregnancy before abortion access could be secured invoked the social flesh inherent in the pregnant body wherein the developing pregnant body shape could betray pregnancy and render one's pregnant embodiment, re-positioned from the private sphere into to communal ownership.

The UnPAC data posits Reproductive Citizenship as relationally framed when mobilised through abortion. Study participants saw themselves as part of a community of abortion seekers. At the time of interview, when the abortion service was new and abortion seekers were attuned to the newly legal status of abortion in Ireland, they imagined themselves within the wider social discourse of abortion in Ireland. When reflecting on their own experiences, they often imagined a person who might be in a situation similar to theirs perhaps with less means of support to manage that situation. They imagined how provision could be better for this future abortion seeker. There was generosity in what supports they tried to identify as useful. For example, Brie used her own abortion seeking process to think about potential barriers for abortion seekers in other situations. They imagined space for other people and in doing so invoked a relationally framed reproductive citizenship such as imagining abortion care calibrated to the particular circumstances of each person presenting.

Conclusions

When states place emphasis on nationalist discourses to control women's sexuality and therefore the boundaries and futures of the nation state, individual women are prohibited from enjoying full expression of their reproductive capacities, their citizenship, and their human rights. This linkage comes to the crux of reproductive citizenship – for women to fully actualise their rights as citizens and humans, they must have freedom from individual restrictions on their reproductive expression, and natalist national policies. Repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution was saturated with signifiers distancing abortion and Irishness and subsequent legalisation of abortion in some circumstances can be seen as enhancing reproductive citizenship within the Irish state. Reflecting on the legalisation of abortion in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, reproductive citizenship is a concept that enables a generative means for thinking about an all-island citizenship that moves beyond borders. Analysis of empirical data portraying experience of abortion seeking in the wake of legalisation reveals multiple facets to reproductive citizenship as a lived, relational, embodied or fleshy concept mobilised by abortion as a reproductive capacity. How abortion provision mobilises reproductive citizenship and how citizenship is constituted or delimited by the regulation of abortion as a reproductive capacity in fleshly, affective, relational and other ways will continue to be explored in our All-Island study to show directions that abortion and wider reproductive capacities can take after the Review and beyond.