On the Embodied Experience of Anti-abortion Laws and Regulations: The Gendered Burden of ‘Abortion Work’

Abstract

This article explores how abortion laws and regulations are experienced by women and others who may become pregnant at the level of the affected body. It theorises that laws, policies, and regulations which criminalise or obstruct access to abortion shape the embodied subjectivities of gestating individuals in contextually specific ways. This research analyses the experiences of abortion activists in Ireland living under the 8th amendment – the constitutional abortion ban (1983–2018). It proposes the concept of ‘abortion work’ to exemplify the additional forms of reproductive labour imposed on women and people who have historically been forced to anticipate, plan for, and access clandestine abortions inside and outside of Irish borders. It explores how the experience of doing ‘abortion work’ changes the relationship of these individuals to their bodies, which they come to experience ‘out of space-and-time’ and as sites of both intense vulnerability and insurgent agency at the same time.

Introduction

In May 2018, following a sustained grassroots and international pro-choice campaign, the Irish electorate voted to repeal the country’s constitutional abortion ban, by a landslide margin of 66.6% (Griffin et al., 2019). The removal of Ireland’s 8th amendment – which constitutionally enshrined the equal ‘right to life’ of the unborn – paved the way for the systematic legal provision of abortion for the first time in the country’s history. Seven months after the referendum, the Irish government signed the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act into law, in December 2018. In comparison to other Western European abortion laws, the Health Act 2018 outlines a rather restrictive set of permissible grounds for accessing legal abortion in Ireland, allowing abortion ‘on request’ only up to 12 weeks and later abortions only ‘where there is a risk of serious harm to the woman’s health, a risk to her life, or a fatal diagnosis of the foetus’ (De Londras, 2020: 3). Despite the many remaining gaps in provision, the repeal of the 8th amendment – that ‘spectre’ which hung over women and pregnant people in Ireland for decades – signified a momentous victory for Irish feminism (AIMS Ireland, 2017).

Over the past 30 years, scholarship on Irish abortion politics has focused largely upon how Irish laws ‘exiled’ abortion-seekers or on the role of the 8th amendment in the provision of maternity care (De Londras and Enright, 2018; Rossiter, 2009). In 1992, the ‘exportation of reproductive healthcare’ was ‘enshrined in law’, as abortion-seekers were given the formal right to information on abortion services and the right to travel outside of Ireland to access care (Carnegie and Roth, 2019: 111). The insertion of the 8th amendment brought with it devastating legal and medical ramifications. Transposed into the National Consent Policy of the Irish health service, pregnant people could be subjected to medical treatments against their will, or have their medical treatments stopped in cases where such treatments were deemed to potentially jeopardise foetal life or health (De Londras and Enright, 2018).

Much of the research pertaining to Ireland’s abortion laws has focused then on how the ‘major’ reproductive events of pregnancy, abortion, or birth have been affected – both legally and in terms of the provision of medical care – by the country’s constitutional abortion ban. What remains underexplored, by contrast, is how the everyday, bodily experiences of women and others who may become pregnant in Ireland were shaped by and in accordance with the constitutional abortion ban. This research addresses this gap and poses the question of how the 8th amendment shaped the embodied subjectivities of women and others who may become pregnant living inside of Ireland’s anti-abortion regime. Taking the Republic of Ireland as a case study, it constitutes an empirically grounded move to expand our understanding of the lived or felt bodily experience of anti-abortion laws and regulations.

This research attempts to tell a different story about women’s bodies and abortion politics in Ireland. It does so by applying an analytical framework which borrows from feminist phenomenology, affect theory, and social movement scholarship, to analyse the embodied experience of Irish activists growing up and living under the constitutional abortion ban (Ahmed, 2006; Dolezal, 2015; Sutton, 2010; Thapan, 2009). I chose to explore the embodied and affective experiences of abortion activists because I wanted to capture the spectrum of ways in which women and people who may become pregnant in Ireland experience, respond to, and resist reproductive coercion with and through their bodies, from the level of their everyday, ‘mundane’ bodily activities and practices, to their involvement in formal political organising. In addition, I argue that the experiential, embodied testimonies of abortion activists constitute fertile epistemic ground and have historically been marginalised in academic research and political debate on women’s health and reproductive rights, in favour of more ‘scientific’ or ‘evidence-based’ accounts (O’Shaughnessy et al., 2023).

Taking a phenomenological approach to the study of embodiment, I consider ‘consciousness and the body together as aspects of an integrated and projective unity’ and take the ‘first-person intuitive’ accounts of Irish abortion activists as the starting point for this analysis (Dolezal, 2015: 8). As Meenashki Thapan (2009) argues in her research on women’s embodiment in contemporary India, the study of embodiment is ‘imperative to understanding women’s struggle and position’ (p.xiii). I argue that to fully appreciate what was at stake in the struggle to repeal the 8th amendment, the embodied experience of living under Ireland’s anti-abortion regime must be more thoroughly conceptualised. My approach here is guided specifically by the principles of feminist phenomenology, which ‘combines insights regarding embodied experience, through phenomenological investigation’ with ‘questions about the discursive structures which frame that experience, through feminist theory’ (p.13).

In this vein and borrowing from the work of Barbara Sutton’s (2010) on the ‘bodily worlds’ of activist and non-activist women in Argentina, I conceptualise the bodies of Irish women as ‘sites of power inscription and contestation’ (p.2). Returning to her country of origin during the economic collapse and citizens’ uprising in 2001, Sutton poses the question of how these political and social transformations are felt in the bodies of Argentinian women. Sutton’s (2010) research demonstrates how ‘powerful ideologies and institutions’ in Argentina ‘regulate and control women’s bodies’, while, at the same time, illustrating how women ‘cope, negotiate, and resist these forces’ as ‘embodied beings’ (p. 2). Adopting a similar analytical approach to Sutton, I argue that the embodied testimonies of Irish abortion activists can be conceptualised as ‘part of a social pattern’ (Sutton, 2010: 6).

My theoretical approach is indebted as well to the work of Sara Ahmed, whose queer phenomenological framework emphasises ‘the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance or nearness of what is ready-to-hand and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds’ (Ahmed, 2006: 2). Inspired by Ahmed, I make the spatial and temporal ‘orientation’ of activists’ bodies central to my analysis and think critically about how the bodies of women and people who may become pregnant are ‘directed’ and ‘take shape’ (Ahmed, 2006: 2). Thinking about how social structures create a ‘physical press’ which leaves an ‘impression’ on the surface of the body, I pay close attention to how Irish activists are ‘affected’ by systems of reproductive governance (Ahmed, 2006: 7; Mavuso and Chadwick, 2022).

Ethical approval for this research was granted by the Ethics Committee in the Department of Sociology, at the University of Cambridge. Data collection was carried out between December 2019 and March 2021. Forty-three interviews – including both face-to-face and online or telephone interviews – were completed. Participants ranged in age from early 20s to late 60s and came from all four provinces in Ireland, and from a range of urban and rural areas. Five participants were first generation migrants, from Asian, North American, British, Eastern European, and Anglo-Caribbean backgrounds. The majority of participants were from a White-Irish and settled population. Fifteen activists identified themselves as part of the LGBTQ community. All names cited in the subsequent analysis are pseudonyms and all potentially identifying information in relation to participants has been removed.

Contextualising Irish Abortion Politics

Abortion was first made illegal in Ireland under the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act – an English, colonial law which criminalised the ‘unlawful procurement of miscarriage’ (Offences Against the Persons Act 1861). Up until this period, and in line with prevailing religious and medical understandings, early abortions (before the fourth or fifth month of gestation) were not regarded as immoral or illegal, as women were not considered pregnant until the foetus ‘quickened’ (could be felt moving) in the womb (Henke, 2018: 115). ‘Backstreet’ abortions as well as infanticide were also common in Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries (Connolly, 2002: 160).

Scholarship on abortion in Ireland has focused heavily on the ‘co-constitutive relationship’ between gender politics and ‘women’s occupation of space’ (Fischer, 2019: 41). Postcolonial theorists studying abortion in the Irish context have argued that, after gaining independence from the British Empire in the early 20th century, ‘nation-building’ in Ireland was premised largely on the idea of ‘the superiority of the Catholic Celts and their reproducing women’ (Fletcher, 2005: 376). Catholic Ireland constructed itself as a bastion for the veneration of motherhood and as a protector of the sanctity of ‘unborn’ life; in opposition to Protestant England which, it was argued, used abortion as a colonial weapon against the Irish people (Fischer, 2019).

Although the ‘idealisation of motherhood’ was a prominent feature of the Irish Free State (established in the aftermath of the War of Independence between the Irish Republic and Britain), pregnancy outside of marriage was heavily stigmatised and the ‘unmarried mother’ was constructed as a ‘social and political problem’ (Luddy, 2011: 112–113). Unmarried mothers faced systematic detention inside institutions like the Magdalene Asylums, designed to manage the risk of contagion of ‘sexual deviants’ (Luddy, 2007: 84). They also faced confinement in ‘county homes’ – originally built in the 1840s as workhouses, these institutions were ‘designed to be grim and foreboding places in order to deter all but the most desperate from seeking refuge there’ (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2012: 11).

This disciplining of female fertility was further maintained throughout the 20th and into the 21st century through the forced emigration of pregnant unmarried women and via the systematic ‘off-shoring’ of abortion-seekers, mainly to Great Britain (Calkin, 2019; Grimes, 2016: 2). The legalisation of adoption in Great Britain in 1926 meant that Irish women could travel there, give birth, and place their children for legal adoption (Grimes, 2016). Between 1968 and 1989, an estimated 50,000 abortion-seekers travelled from Ireland to England or Wales to access abortions, which were made legal under the 1967 Abortion Act (Gilmartin and Kennedy, 2019: 126). ¹ This figure increased to an estimated 125,000 abortion travellers in the period between 1990 and 2014 (Gilmartin and Kennedy, 2019).

Concerned with the liberalisation of abortion laws in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s, anti-abortion activists in Ireland began to lobby the government to further copper fasten Ireland’s ‘Pro-Life’ status. The ‘Pro-Life Amendment Campaign’ began advocating for the insertion of an amendment to the constitution enshrining the ‘equal right to life’ of the ‘unborn’ (Connolly, 2002). With the insertion of the 8th amendment in 1983, Ursula Barry (1988: 59) explains, pregnancy would be reconstituted as ‘a conflict between the life of a pregnant woman and her foetus’. Not content with establishing foetal rights in the law, anti-abortion campaigners subsequently attempted to shut down non-directive pregnancy counselling services which offered information to people experiencing unplanned pregnancies (including information on accessing abortions in England) (Connolly, 2002).

In 1992, a 14-year-old girl known as ‘X’, pregnant because of rape, was prevented through High Court injunction from leaving the country to access an abortion. Since the girl’s foetus was guaranteed a ‘right to life’ under the 8th amendment, ‘X’ was compelled to carry the pregnancy to term against her wishes and despite her deteriorating physical and mental state. After intense public debate, the High Court eventually reversed its ruling and allowed ‘X’ to travel to the United Kingdom on the grounds that she was suicidal. She subsequently experienced a miscarriage during this journey. Following the ‘X’ case, referenda were held in November 1992, during which the Irish public voted to legally guarantee the right to information on abortion and the right to travel abroad to access care (Smyth, 2016).

As Luibhéid (2006) observes, while controversy surrounding the X case abounded, news broke that the Irish government had secretly negotiated an appendage to the Maastricht Treaty which would deny Irish women recourse to European Community law to override Irish abortion laws. ² As Angela Martin (2002) explains, in a debate over the X case and the Maastricht Treaty, ‘anxieties over the nation’s boundaries’ became ‘projected onto the bodies of Irish women’ (p.71). Ratification of the Maastricht Treaty allowed the Irish government to safeguard its pro-natalist policy towards settled, White-Irish women, while, at the same time, permitting further restrictions to the entry of ‘uneconomic’ migration and asylum seekers, whose reproduction was seen as ‘threatening’ to the ‘integrity of Irish citizenship’ (Lentin, 2013: 103; Luibhéid, 2006).

The Irish abortion rights movement ‘intensified significantly’ following the death of Savita Halappanavar, who was denied a life-saving abortion in Galway in October 2012 (Calkin et al., 2020: 2). Although Ms. Halappanavar was miscarrying her pregnancy and suffering from septic shock, doctors refused to intervene on the grounds that a foetal heartbeat could still be detected. Subsequent reports into her death revealed ‘gross inadequacies’ in the ‘basic elements of [her] care, (McCarthy, 2016: 11). While Ms. Halappanavar would become a symbol of the Irish abortion movement, she remains one of a multitude of migrant women who have died in the Irish maternity system. While migrant and ethnic minority women account for only 17% of the population, they make up more than 40% of maternal deaths in Ireland (Weerawardhana, 2018).

The Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC) – a grassroots, non-hierarchical organisation campaigning for free, safe, legal abortion across the island of Ireland – which was founded in 2012, gained considerable support following Ms. Halappanavar’s death. Under increasing domestic and international pressure, the Irish government introduced the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act in 2013, outlining for the first time a ‘framework regulating abortion into Irish law’ (Murray, 2016: 667). This legislation maintained a ‘two-tier’ approach to abortion provision in Ireland however, permitting abortion only in the cases where ‘the life of the woman is at risk’ (Murray, 2016). In 2013, the Coalition to Repeal the 8th amendment – an amalgamation of organisations fighting to repeal the constitutional abortion ban – was launched. After years of intensive pro-choice organising which included confrontational direct action, as well as conventional lobbying tactics, the Irish government announced a referendum on the 8th amendment to be held on 25 May 2018. In almost a direct reversal of the 1983 referendum, the 2018 referendum saw 66.6% of voters choose to repeal the 8th amendment, paving the way for the introduction of systematic legal abortion care for the first time in Irish history (Griffin et al., 2019).

‘Preparing Your Story’ and ‘Looking Up Options’: The Gendered Burden of ‘Abortion Work’

This research seeks to analyse the embodied experiences of women and others who may become pregnant living under and mobilising against Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban. It begins with the testimony of Roisin, a White, middle-class, project coordinator in her early thirties whom I met through my abortion activist networks in 2019. Roisin explained how she had first become involved in abortion activism as a student in 2016, when a friend invited her to a demonstration outside the Dáil (Irish Parliament) to support a bill being brought forward by TDs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly proposing the legalisation of abortion in the case of pregnancies with fatal foetal anomalies. When I asked Roisin to reflect on the first time she remembered being aware of abortion, or when she first learned about what an abortion was, she referred to an early association she had made between abortion and ‘travelling’ or ‘going abroad’:

I knew you went to England. I thought it was wrong, but I also knew that if I needed to go to England, I’d think about the story that I would need to have and all of that. I don’t think I really thought about it in terms of how restrictive it was, how degrading it was. Until I was 21, I didn’t think that Ireland was anything unusual. I would have thought that England was more progressive or liberal. But it really fascinates me that I did not question those ideologies. They weren’t even invasive in the sense of being shoved down my throat, they were just there, and I just didn’t question them. It was just the norm. People went to England if they needed to go to England and it was just a common euphemism that nobody thought about.

Roisin’s statement appeared to be marred with contradictions. On the one hand, she explained how, as a young person, she ‘didn’t think anything about’ abortion. In the same breath, she recalls that she ‘knew you went to England’ and that she herself had thought about ‘the story’ she ‘would need to have’ if she had to ‘travel’. Without having had any of these ideas ‘shoved down (her) throat’, Roisin had constructed the idea of abortion as somehow antithetical to Irishness; as a practice which belonged in more ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ countries, like the United Kingdom.

In the aftermath of the referendum in 2018, legal scholar Mairead Enright wrote that pregnant people in Ireland would now be spared ‘the trauma of that journey to England’, which she says ‘has shaped our sense of Irish womanhood for generations’ (De Londras and Enright, 2018: 8–9). Indeed, the idea that this journey to England has been formative to the experience of gendered socialisation in Ireland has reached the status of common sense and yet, little has been done to explain this process in sociological terms. Smith-Oka’s concept of ‘reproductive habitus’ is potentially useful here (Smith-Oka, 2012: 2275). Defined as ‘modes of living the reproductive body’ or ‘largely unconscious bodily practice and orientations that reflect structural relations of categorical inequality’, the reproductive habitus ‘exists in the hazy, grey realm between consciousness and unconsciousness’ (Fleuriet and Sunil, 2015: 103; Smith-Oka, 2012: 2276).

It can be argued then that ‘travelling’ is constitutive of the ‘reproductive habitus’ of Irish women (Smith-Oka, 2012). While activists like Roisin might not remember exactly how or when they learned about ‘going to England’, these internalised thought-patterns are symptomatic of how structural power relations infiltrate the mind and memory of women and people who may become pregnant to replicate patterns of social inequality – particularly, to exclude those who fail to uphold ‘repronormativity’ (i.e. ‘legitimate’, state-sanctioned, forms of reproduction) (Weissman, 2017). In other words, Ireland’s abortion laws have produced within the gestating body an ‘orientation’ towards ‘travelling’ which is both mental and physical. For those with the financial means and mobility privilege to access abortion care abroad, the experience of reproductive embodiment under the 8th means a particular spatial orientation, of always already being oriented towards England.

Listening to Roisin recount her earliest associations with abortion, I was struck by her assertion that if she ‘needed to go to England’ that she would ‘think about the story [she] would need to have and all of that. . .’. By ‘story’, I realised that Roisin meant a ‘cover story’, something she could tell her parents or family to explain her absence if she was forced to travel to England. Roisin’s testimony implied how, for Irish abortion-seekers, ‘travelling’ entailed not only navigating the complicated planning and logistics associated with finding a clinic, securing an appointment, and booking travel and accommodation at the destination (as implied in the ‘and all of that’ portion of Roisin’s statement) but also, more often than not, required a great deal of cognitive and emotional labour to explain or ‘justify’ one’s absence from home. As activist Eileen Flynn states, many women, including Traveller women, ‘don’t really have that choice to travel’ as they cannot explain or ‘sleep away from [. . .] home or [. . .] husband for one night’ (Ní Fhloinn, 2018:91).

Eithne, a young activist from a first-generation Asian migrant background, told me that while she couldn’t remember when she became explicitly aware of the existence of the 8th amendment, she remembered knowing from an early stage that abortion was ‘just not legal here’. Eithne explained how, when she became sexually active herself, she realised how ‘scary’ Ireland’s abortion laws were. Although, as she explains, she and her partner were using multiple forms of contraception, she experienced constant ‘panic’ and anxiety around the possibility of getting pregnant and having to acquire a clandestine abortion:

I remember in the first year of college, I started going on the pill because I was having sex more regularly. That’s when I realized how scary it was and how I did not want to be pregnant. I really do think it’s something no one will understand unless you’ve been there . . . Like, I was on the pill and we were using condoms and still, every time I would get so panicked . . . it was so irrational, but I was looking at all these options, and at the time there were no options, there still aren’t many.

Eithne explained how, ‘every time’ (presumably, every month), she would look up ‘all these options’, trying to put together a plan for how she might go about accessing an abortion, should she require it. She describes feeling ‘sad’ that her boyfriend at the time seemed unconcerned with the issue and placated her that they would simply ‘find a way’ if the situation arose. Eithne’s testimony reveals not only the intense levels of cognitive as well as emotional work associated with having to navigate and plan for a clandestine abortion but also how this form of labour is unequally distributed between men and women. I wondered whether this type of work – coming up with ‘cover stories’ or making abortion ‘travel plans’ – could be conceptualised as part of the ‘mental load’, that is, an element of the ‘cognitive, mnemonic, or invisible work/labour’ associated with planning or managing reproductive labour (Reich-Stiebert et al., 2023). Just like the ‘mental load’, the work of ‘figuring out’ abortion plans seemed generally to be assigned to women and others who may become pregnant.

Sadbh was a teenager in the 1990s, a period she describes as a ‘fraught time’ for abortion rights in Ireland. Coming from what she described as a ‘middle-class, professional’ rural family, Sadbh told me how her parents were ‘probably more old-fashioned than most’. When I asked her to explain this further, she told me that ‘the class aspect was very important’ in terms of how she ‘understood the dynamic’ in her own family. Sadbh explained that ‘the ideal situation’ for women, as she learned it, was ‘to be vaguely virginal’ until marriage. As Diarmuid Ferriter (2009) explains, historically speaking, the farming class in Ireland has strongly upheld strict Catholic teachings on sexuality, in the interests of controlling women’s reproduction, and thereby shoring up land and assets. When I asked her about her first encounter with abortion politics, Sadbh clarifies that while the topic was never engaged directly in her home, she had a ‘very strong sense’ that her family would ‘want the issue resolved’:

When I was old enough to understand pregnancy and my own risk of pregnancy, it wasn’t intellectual then, it was more emotional. I’d need to be able to access this if I needed it. I always had this morbid fear of pregnancy anyway, thought it was the most awful concept, still do [laughs] I was so afraid of the very idea. I think I thought very strongly that it would have to just be ended, I would have to make it stop. And whatever had to be done, to do that, you know . . . I do remember reading stories about people having hot baths or throwing themselves down the stairs, and I remember thinking that I would do that if I had to.

Here, Sadbh describes her earlier understanding of abortion as ‘intellectual’ (perhaps, invoking this idea of a ‘mental association’ between abortion and ‘foreignness’ as described earlier). This form of relationality became complicated, however, once Sadbh became ‘physically aware of pregnancy as a possibility’. What Sadbh is describing here is a transition where the prohibition of abortion is suddenly felt in the body. Describing how she was suddenly ‘so afraid’, Sadbh reveals how this realisation carried with it a particular affective experience of vulnerability and fear. Perhaps one of the things Sadbh feared was the possibility of being incarcerated in a Magdalene Laundry. The last of these institutions, Our Lady of Charity on Sean McDermott Street in Dublin, only closed its doors in October 1996, when Sadbh was a teenager (Culliton, 1996).

Listening to Sadbh recount what can only be described as her ‘abortion contingency plans’ – specifically, her proposal that if she experienced an unplanned pregnancy, she would throw herself down the stairs or immerse herself in a very hot bath to induce a miscarriage – I thought about how this fear of unplanned pregnancy, as she experienced it, had changed her relationship to her body. Specifically, I was struck with Sadbh’s apparent willingness to throw her body around. I couldn’t quite decide whether the body she was describing to me was a site of intense vulnerability, or the site of expression of a radical agency which, in refusing coerced pregnancy, powerfully rejected both the state’s pro-natalist regime, and the possibility of being incarcerated in one of any of the institutions which formed an integral part of Ireland’s ‘shame-industrial complex’ (Hogan, 2019).

Both Sadbh and Eithne appear to describe a similar experience then, a particular state of ‘fear’ or ‘panic’, the product of recognising oneself as potentially pregnant in an environment where pregnancy instantiated a very specific form of gendered vulnerability. Taking its origin in the Latin word ‘vulnus’, vulnerability describes ‘the capacity to be wounded and suffer’ (Koivunen et al., 2018: 4). Vulnerability can be synonymous for ‘marginalisation or subordination, especially when it is invoked in connection to those who suffer or experience discrimination due to how they are categorised’ (Koivunen et al., 2018: 7). Vulnerability, unlike ‘discrimination’ however, has a distinctly more ‘embodied’ or ‘corporeal’ nature (Koivunen et al., 2018: 9). It invokes the idea of ‘openness’ or ‘injury’ (Koivunen et al., 2018). I remember Sadbh’s readiness to throw her body down the stairs and think about the idea of vulnerability as both ‘an existential condition’ and ‘socially induced’ (Butler, 2016: 22, 25).

Sara Ahmed (2014) describes how the ‘openness of the body to the world involves a sense of danger, which is anticipated as a future pain or injury[. . .]the body shrinks back from the world in the desire to avoid the object of fear’ (p.69). Ahmed (2014) continues, explaining how ‘fear works to contain some bodies’, restricting the body’s movement ‘insofar as it seems to prepare the body for flight’ (p.69). In the case of Ireland, it can be argued that fear did indeed prepare the body for flight(s). . .as well as for boats, and for stairs too. Listening to these activists’ testimonies, I began to wonder about the cognitive, emotional, and physical labour involved, not only for those who end up needing to access a clandestine abortion but for all of those who are forced to research, plan, and prepare for this possibility. Could we conceptualise this type of work as a form of reproductive labour in itself? Eabha’s testimony is particularly illuminating in this regard. She explains how, after the birth of her second child, she decided that she would have an abortion if she were to become pregnant a third time:

Once I recovered from number two, I knew there couldn’t be a number three, under any circumstances. Obviously, I did everything in my power to make sure there wouldn’t be, but that’s not always enough. So, I did make a decision that were I ever to get pregnant again, I was going to travel. And I knew that I had the privilege, and the money and resources to fly and stay and do it in comfort.

Two things struck me about Eabha’s statement. First, she had made a very clear decision that she would travel in the event of a third pregnancy and second, she had already made specific plans around the logistical aspects of this trip. I was particularly intrigued by her proclamation that, if she were to travel, she would ‘do it in comfort’. Her words indicate a further form of reproductive stratification vis-à-vis the modes of travelling available to Irish abortion-seekers. Those with access to certain levels of economic and social capital were able to ‘fly’ and ‘stay over’ while individuals without access to passports, or economically marginalised individuals were forced into the cheaper and often less bureaucratic option of sea travel, and to travel over and back again in the same day.

Sociologist Andrea Bertotti coins as ‘fertility work’ the ‘labour and responsibility associated with navigating a couple’s fertility’, including the work of adopting, managing, and planning contraceptive methods (Bertotti, 2013: 13). The concept is taken up by Katrina Kimport who describes ‘fertility work’ as entailing not only the ‘physical burdens of contraception’ but also the ‘associated time, attention, and stress’ (Littlejohn, 2021 in Kimport, 2018: 2; Bertotti, 2013 in Kimport, 2018: 2). Kimport argues that gender inequality is reproduced when the responsibility of preventing pregnancy (and the responsibility of ‘fertility work’, more broadly) is unquestioningly and disproportionately assigned to women. Drawing upon this research, I propose the concept of ‘abortion work’, to encapsulate the cognitive, affective, and physical, bodily labour which is unequally imposed on women and others who may become pregnant, as they plan for, prepare for, and negotiate access to clandestine abortions.

‘Abortion work’ can be compared both to ‘fertility work’ and to the ‘mental load’ of navigating and organising reproductive labour, in so far as much ‘abortion work’ is cognitive or ‘thinking work’ and thus it constitutes an invisible form of reproductive labour (Bertotti, 2013; Reich-Stiebert et al., 2023). Moreover, like ‘fertility work’, ‘abortion work’ is unequally distributed along various axes of oppression, including but not limited to those of gender, ‘race’, and class. Predominantly, it is women who are burdened with ‘abortion work’, and ‘abortion work’ is more complicated for migrant women, for example, who must plan and prepare for negotiating visa applications and language barriers as part of making their ‘abortion contingency plans’, and for working-class women, who may have to contend with additional, potential economic burdens. Finally as Reich-Stiebert et al. (2023) explain, just as the ‘mental load’ brings with it ‘negative implications for women’s well-being and mental health’, ‘abortion work’ brings with it a longitudinal experience of anxiety, vulnerability and fear (p.466).

What makes ‘abortion work’ different then, at least in the Irish context, is its distinctive affective quality. Women like Eithne and Sadbh are faced with a chronic sense of anxiety, panic, or fear, the product of living with the ‘life-threatening risk’ of the 8th amendment hanging over them (Connolly, 2020). Moreover, while many women do ‘abortion work’ in an attempt to offset or circumvent their vulnerability to reproductive violence, in some cases, doing ‘abortion work’ can increase one’s vulnerability to structural harms, for example criminalisation. ³ Thus, while not all aspects of ‘abortion work’ are invisible, in contexts where abortion is illegal, even the more explicitly ‘physical’ aspects of ‘abortion work’ – for example, purchasing and keeping a stock of illegal abortion pills – must remain necessarily invisibilised in order to protect women and abortion-seekers, and their allies.

Finally, ‘abortion work’ can be conceptualised as a form of reproductive labour with a distinctly subversive quality. Through the doing of ‘abortion work’, women and people who may become pregnant engage their cognitive skills, their emotional labour, and their physical bodies to resist state-mandated regimes of compulsory pregnancy. It is important to note that while much ‘abortion work’ is done in the shadows, solidarity networks and activist groups like Speaking of Imelda, and the Abortion Support Network in Ireland have historically served to assist abortion-seekers to bring their ‘abortion contingency plans’ to fruition. Finally, through doing ‘abortion work’, these individuals transform their relationships with their bodies. While on the one hand we can see the burden of ‘abortion work’ as emblematic of the state’s efforts to punish women and people who may become pregnant, we can also see through the doing of ‘abortion work’, a method by which these individuals reappropriate their embodied labour to preserve and defend their bodily autonomy.

Through the concept of ‘abortion work’, we can see how for those living under the jurisdiction of the 8th amendment, their everyday embodied experience entails not only a particular spatial orientation (of being turned towards England) and unique affective orientation (of vulnerability and fear), but a specific temporal orientation too. Activists like Eabha exist in an anticipatory state vis-à-vis the potentiality of needing to acquire an abortion. The idea that one’s reproductive body or experiences may be organised according to a specific temporal politics is not new; reproduction itself has long been understood as having an ‘essentially temporal dimension’ (Bock von Wülfingen et al., 2015: 2). By capitalising on what has been described by queer theorists as our inherent ‘compulsion to embrace our own futurity’, contemporary politics appropriates and deploys ‘the future’ – enshrined in ‘the figure of the child’ – as an organising principle to mandate a particular heteronormative (reproductive) life course (Edelman, 2004: 21).

Vincanne Adams, Michelle Murphy and Adele Clarke write that the ‘defining quality of our current moment’ is not the future but anticipation, that is, a characteristic state of ‘thinking and living toward the future’ (Adams et al., 2009: 246). Adams et al. explain how this characteristic state of anticipation implies both an affective and a temporal orientation. Anxiety and fear (tied to ‘unpreparedness’ and an unknowable future) become important ‘political vectors’ to ‘interpellate and govern subjects’ (Adams et al., 2009: 249). Adams et al. (2009) coin the term ‘injunction’ to describe the ‘moral imperative’ to ‘characterize and inhabit states of uncertainty’ and develop the term ‘abduction’ to describe the labour associated with the ‘requisite tacking back and forth between futures, pasts, and presents’ (p.249). Of chief concern for this analysis, they describe the moral imperative to characterise and live with/in states of uncertainty as itself a mechanism of disciplining the subject-body (Adams et al., 2009). The injunction to anticipate, they explain, is a ‘requirement to be obedient’ which ‘demands action’ (Adams et al., 2009: 254, 256).

Adams et al. (2009) claim that anticipation has become a ‘lived affect-state of daily life’ which ‘shapes regimes of self, health and spirituality’ (p.247). They depict the ‘biomedical’ sphere as an ‘exemplary site of anticipatory practice’, citing the work of feminist technoscience scholars whose research, they contend, has illustrated the various ways in which ‘anticipatory modes reach before birth to fetal management and yet further back to conception, as active domains of the present that allow tactical interventions to prevent and/or enable imagined futures’ (Adams et al., 2009: 251). Edmée Ballif’s (2023) research on Swiss prenatal care regimes, for example, reveals how the behaviours of women intending to become pregnant are surveyed and controlled in the interests of safeguarding the ‘anticipated foetal subject’ (p.483).

It is possible, then, through the concept of ‘abortion work’ to illustrate how these ‘anticipatory modes’ reach back before conception and even before the period of anticipated pregnancy or ‘pre-pregnancy’, expanding in their scope to shape and transform the intimate, affective, reproductive experiences and the everyday embodied practices of women and others who may become pregnant (Adams et al., 2009; Ballif, 2023; Wagonner, 2017). Wagonner (2017) coins as the ‘zero trimester’ the ‘months or years prior to conception in which women are urged to prepare their bodies for a healthy pregnancy’ (p. 3). In similar terms, the concept of ‘abortion work’ reveals a new temporal space of ‘pre-abortion’, which is part of the reproductive life course for women and others who may become pregnant living under strict anti-abortion regimes. Aoibhinn, a social worker in her early 40s, explained how living in this ‘pre-abortion’ space creates an intensive financial burden as she is forced to maintain an ‘abortion fund’ containing enough money to allow her to be able ‘to travel’ on short notice:

Before the campaign, I always had the abortion fund in the bank, or the ability to get that loan out of the credit union. If I needed to go to England, and you’re talking about €2,000. I always tried to have that money, money you couldn’t spend. And I was afraid, so many of us were afraid, so many of us were. For ourselves and for each other.

Here, Aoibhinn contrasts how before the 2018 referendum which saw the constitutional abortion ban repealed, she ‘always had the abortion fund’ in the bank or ‘the ability to get a loan out of the credit union’. This ‘abortion fund’ consisted of money that she ‘couldn’t spend’ and which existed only for the purposes of having to travel to the United Kingdom or elsewhere to procure reproductive care. In her research, O’Halloran-Bermingham (forthcoming) explores how many working-class Irish women created communal ‘abortion funds’, which would sometimes consist of monies borrowed from their children’s First Holy Communion collections. Through the creation of the ‘abortion fund’ then, we can see how ‘abortion work’ requires a long-term investment of anticipatory labour and material resources for women and others who may become pregnant living under strict anti-abortion regimes.

Conclusion: ‘Abortion Work’ Post-Repeal and Beyond Irish Borders?

Exploring the embodied testimony of Irish abortion activists, this research illustrates how the regulation of abortion in Ireland was historically constituted not only through the criminalisation of abortion in the law, but through the spatial, affective, and temporal regulation of reproductive bodies. This assemblage of regulatory forces operated as a mode of disciplining women and people who may become pregnant, outside of the ‘repronormative’ regime (Weissman, 2017). Ireland’s anti-abortion regime produced in women and others who may become pregnant a system of thought-patterns, which always already ‘turned’ them away, which mandated the movement of the aborting body across borders, and which produced an affective state of fear and vulnerability, as they laboured to ‘take care’ of unplanned pregnancies before they were even conceived.

This research reveals the subtle, yet far-reaching effects of Ireland’s anti-abortion regime, not only in the moment when access to abortion was sought, but in shaping the quotidian, bodily, and emotional experiences of women and others who may become pregnant, living under its jurisdiction. Recounting their abortion contingency plans which include (among other strategies) funnelling money away into ‘abortion funds’, or the proposal to throw oneself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage, these activists reveal how the ‘pre-pregnant’ body comes to be experienced as a site of acute, gendered vulnerability, and as the location of a subversive, counter-hegemonic resistance at the same time. For many women and people who may become pregnant, the repeal of the constitutional abortion ban was experienced as the removal of that embodied burden, of that unique sense of bodily vulnerability, that the 8th amendment produced (AIMS Ireland, 2017).

It is important to note, however, that the majority of those who took part in this research were of a White, settled, middle-class background. There is no doubt that for individuals from marginalised backgrounds, there are other ‘spectres’ (apart from the 8th amendment) which continue to haunt their experience of reproductive healthcare, and which impose on them additional cognitive, emotional, and physical burdens (AIMS Ireland, 2017). The spectre of the disproportionate maternal morbidity rate for ethnic minority and migrant women and people, for example, which stands at a fourfold difference for those from Black backgrounds and an almost twofold difference for those from Asian backgrounds (Masheti, 2021). Or the spectre of criminalisation for those who do not qualify for an abortion under the narrow confines of the Health Act 2018, and who do not have the money or documentation required to travel to the United Kingdom, thus being forced to attempt self-abortion, often by purchasing abortion pills.

In this post-repeal landscape, many individuals and communities are forced to continue to engage in ‘abortion work’. As recent research illustrates, rural abortion-seekers, disabled women and people, homeless communities, and migrants in Direct Provision continue to face additional obstacles in navigating the abortion provision system (Duffy and Grimes, 2023; Grimes and ARC, 2021). That is, the burden of ‘abortion work’ continues to be displaced from the state onto women and people who may become pregnant, thereby reflecting, and reproducing intersecting systems of gender, racial, and economic inequality. In this way, the framework of ‘abortion work’ provides a clear illustration of the importance of a reproductive justice approach which seeks not only to change laws but to transform the broader structural conditions which overburden specific bodies with this form of reproductive labour (Ross, 2017).

The concept of ‘abortion work’ which this research proposes has broader import for feminist scholarship on reproductive politics. By designating a framework which encapsulates the cognitive, emotional, and physical labour women and others who may become pregnant undertake as they plan for and navigate access to clandestine abortions, this research reveals a unique form of reproductive labour which has thus far been excluded from feminist theorisations. As Duffy (2007) notes, the category of ‘reproductive labour’ was elaborated by feminists in the 1970s ‘with the goal of naming and analysing a category of work that had previously remained virtually invisible within sociology and economics: women’s unpaid work in the home’ (Duffy, 2007, 315). The historic devaluation of reproductive labour is regarded as integral to the perpetual subordination of women in society (Duffy, 2007). In the same way, the framework of ‘abortion work’ offers insight into how women and others who may become pregnant are continually burdened and subordinated through their reproductive bodies.

The framework of ‘abortion work’ can be directly transposed, I argue, to explore and explain the lived experiences of women and others who may become pregnant in alternative contexts and to exemplify the long-term embodied effects of anti-abortion regulations. In their book Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America, David S. Cohen and Carol Joffe (2020) explore the ‘multiple compounding roadblocks’ which women and abortion-seekers across the United States face in their search for care, including ‘finding and getting to a clinic’, ‘coming up with money’ and navigating anti-abortion activity ‘at the clinic door’ (pp.7–8). These multiple barriers exist, Cohen and Joffe (2020) write, because of ‘abortion exceptionalism’ – that is, the idea that abortion should be treated ‘uniquely compared to other medical procedures’. In many ways, this framework of ‘abortion work’ unveils the embodied effects of ‘abortion exceptionalism’ for women and others who may become pregnant in their everyday lives.

To conclude, the framework of ‘abortion work’ reveals another manner through which abortion regulations and laws discipline and subjugate women and others who may become pregnant and demonstrates how systems of reproductive violence are inscribed and felt at the level of the affected body. It also reveals, however, way in which they fight back against systems of reproductive coercion and circumvent laws and policies which criminalise abortion, in their everyday lives.