Wrong for womankind and the nation: Anti-abortion discourses in 20th-century Ireland

Abstract

This article asks how anti-abortion discourses and dialogues engaged with ideas about motherhood, national identity, and women’s reproductive decision-making in 20th-century Ireland, particularly from 1967, when abortion was decriminalized in Britain, to 1983, when Ireland’s Eighth Amendment became the law of the land. It assesses the ways in which ‘pro-life’ advocates rejected the notion that women were independent adults capable of reproductive decision-making. Indeed, throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, anti-choice activists defined all Irish women as innately innocent, moral, and naturally desirous of domesticity and motherhood. Abortion, they argued, was encouraged, coerced, and even forced by outsiders or ‘others’. The arguments of some anti-abortion activists utilized meaningful themes in Ireland’s colonial and nationalist history, including the historical notion of Irish sacrificial motherhood, the depiction of Irish women as young and vulnerable, and the explanation of abortion as foreign, anti-Irish, and reminiscent of British colonial repression.