Times have changed in Ireland, which up until the mid 1990s was one of the most socially conservative countries in Europe. The country, tyrannised by Catholic values and traditions, was a patriarchal bastion more akin nowadays to evangelical and socially conservative locales in parts of the USA. With state independence in 1922, national identity was a special focus and became a retooled extra holy version of Catholicism, a “holy Irishness” (Scally, 2022) that demanded and got near wholescale social conformity with strict canonical Catholic orthodoxy. By the end of the century, this had become an embarrassment to a vastly more modern and liberal Ireland, which has since embraced divorce (1996), civil partnership (2013), equal marriage (2015), less restricted divorce (2019), and abortion (2019) in addition to legislative rights and protections for adoptees, diverse family and parental arrangements, and those whose births were improperly registered. These developments are of profound significance given the duration of conformity to the heteronormative nuclear family. In this short piece, I will focus on the emerging history of women who since independence became pregnant outside of marriage and were exiled within the state to special institutions, mother and baby homes, or forced into exile abroad to seek an abortion. I aim to unpack historical aspects of this exiling and consider the importance of recent developments in reproductive freedoms for Irish women. Some elements of repetition are discernible in these significant developments but first some historical context is useful.

The Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, 2021), commissioned to provide an official record of the half-hidden history of unmarried mothers and their children by state, public, and religious institutions, revealed that almost 120,000 women and children took up residency in special homes between 1922 and 1996. Many children died due to poor medical support, others were adopted, sometimes illegally, others farmed out to industrial schools where conditions were regimental and sometimes brutal. From all corners of Irish society, unmarried women and their children were treated with social and familial stigmatization, contempt, and many were sentenced to isolation in special homes or emigration abroad. In mother and baby homes, the length of stay for some was heartbreakingly brief—a few minutes, hours, or days for babies who died due to poor infant care—but for mothers who had nowhere else to go, a lifetime sequestered away within institutions predominantly run by religious orders that were the opposite of “homes,” being little short of prisons where they were expected to work without pay for their room and board. The notorious Magdalene-run laundries made unpaid laundresses out of women as penance for their sins, where, in brutal conditions they spent their days washing linens for local hotels and establishments. Extending far beyond a symbolic gesture of cleansing, this was in material terms the exploitation of vulnerable women as slave labour for profit by the Magdalene order.

In the broader picture, post-independence Ireland was a patriarchal society dominated by a highly conservative Catholic ethos, the inmixing of religious and governmental interests and a populace struggling with self-governance, national identity, and differentiation from the colonial Other. Women were represented by two oppositional tropes of motherhood: a mythical ideal of Catholic Marian purity and, conversely, a debased debauched version of motherhood, the unmarried mother, upon whom was projected the impurities of the nascent body politic. A doctrine of Irish Catholic legitimacy symbolised by the nuclear family was supported by an illegitimate other, the unmarried mother, whose perversity was matched by the degradation of her lowly circumstances—outcast from communities and deposited or imprisoned in special homes, institutions, industrial schools, or forced to emigrate. In effect, unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children offered up a phantasmatic site on which to pin the body politic’s own disavowed shame and transgressive drives.

By the close of the twentieth century, the social landscape of Ireland was dramatically different, with a rapidly changing and modernising society with economic stability, inward immigration, advancing secularization, Europeanization, and a population seeking greater social freedom. The decline of the influence of the Catholic church was sealed by a series of scandalous reports (Ferns Report 2005, Ryan Report 2009, Murphy Report 2009, Cloyne Report 2011) detailing the abuse of children by church officials for decades and with the knowledge of those in authority. Today, Ireland is one of the most socially progressive states in Europe with divorce, gay marriage, and abortion now available and, according to the Central Statistics Office (2021), in 2020 around 40 percent of babies are born outside of maritally constituted relationships. In just over two decades, the country has thrown off the shackles of the past with liberal changes that would make it unrecognisable to its former self. There is a diversity of families and family life, with blended families, single parenting, and same sex-couple parenting supported by the availability of assisted reproduction services. However, if we look closely, we can observe some traces of repetition.

In 2015, much-needed legislation in the field of assisted reproduction was introduced to address lacunae in legal rights for those availing of reproductive services. The Children and Family Relationships Act 2015 provides a legal framework for adoption, guardianship, custody, donor-assisted reproduction, and the rights and responsibilities of intending parents, donor-conceived children, donors and those involved in delivering fertility services. Problematically, surrogacy remains outside of the legislation and will be considered separately, and the legislation applies only to couples where a female partner is the birth mother, as is the case in heterosexual and lesbian couples. Non-biological gay male parents are currently excluded from legal rights and protections. The legislation was held up as certain aspects of it were debated. One area is noteworthy. Parental groups advocated for the right of a parent or parents not to register a sperm donor but the legislation eventually came into force with a mandatory register of sperm donors. While sperm donation is neither equivalent nor substitutive for parenting, making it impossible to trace donor sperm and progenitor history would have recalled the omission of fathers from the birth certificates of the so-called “illegitimate” children of the unmarried mothers of yesteryear. This omission of fathers is also repeated in the non-recognition of two men as constituting a parenting couple.

Legally recognising and protecting all mothers regardless of their marital or relationship status is necessary and right, and is a correction of past wrongs that egregiously forced women to carry the sole responsibility for a child conceived out of wedlock in an unjust system that was supported by the wholesale exclusion of male progenitors from the birth records of their progeny. This made it impossible for children in some cases to ever trace their lineage. Lineage is part history, myth, and the empty place of desire or, as Lacan (1966/2006, p. 215) put it, is sometimes a blank or a lie. Coming to terms with and making a meaningful sense of history and lineage can have curative effects for an individual. Psychoanalytically, we are mindful that past repressions return in unseen and obsequious ways and the effort to permanently deny sperm donor and progenitor history to children conceived through human reproductive services is open to interpretation as a repetition of omissions of parental history from official records. The deliberate occlusion of sperm donors from records, while coming from a place dedicated to the restitution of motherhood in light of terrible past wrongs, can present challenges to those who seek to know their history of origin as fully as possible. Knowing it is a step to not being insufferably constrained by it.

The national abortion referendum in 2018 was monumental and thousands of expatriate Irish women returned to Ireland from abroad to vote. Scenes of women arriving in to Irish airports from all over the world to vote were unforgettable and represented a stunning reversal of the history of exiling the problem abroad to abortion clinics in Manchester, Liverpool, and London; a reality endured by thousands of frightened Irish women over many decades. Against this, in 2018 the Irish body politic, including Irish expatriates and the new immigrant Irish, took up the abortion cause and determined to right the wrongs of the past and script a different future for women and their reproductive freedom. This resulted in the repeal of some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the European Union: the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, instituted in 1983, granted equal rights to the foetus and the mother, outlawing abortion in all cases except when a mother’s life is at risk. The eighth amendment in 1983 was a response to a 1974 Supreme Court case, McGee v. The Attorney General, which found that individuals had a right to marital privacy and this extended to the importation of contraception. The potential similarities between this decision and America’s Roe v. Wade caused pro-life activists in Ireland to fear a similar decision could be made in relation to abortion and it led to the establishment of a lobby to make abortion, which was illegal, also unconstitutional. From church pulpits, a variation of “holy Irishness” grounded as before in the heteronormative nuclear family was successfully releveraged, reigniting the role of the Catholic church in state affairs as before in the post-independence era. This effort to control women and reproductive choice in the 1980s capped an identity crisis brewing since the late 1960s as a result of an expanding middle class, slow secularization, and the seeping influence of European intercultural economics, policies, and values. By 2018, a wave of women led the social body in “repealing the eighth” and scripting a different future for women and their reproductive freedom.

Irish feminism, as feminism everywhere, has faced its own crises and fragmentation in an evolving and modernising Ireland but has found common cause and unity in the abortion cause and in avowing the misogynistic injustices and shameful cruelties of the scapegoating of women in moments of national identity crises for an anxious body politic. But there are new areas of concern. The rise in domestic violence during the Covid pandemic is indicative of ongoing and increasing misogyny. Women’s Aid reported a 43 percent increase in 2020 in women contacting their services compared to 2019. This “tsunami of cases” of domestic abuse, 25,000 disclosures pertaining to women and 6,000 pertaining to children (Wilson, 2021), indicates the domestic sphere is increasingly unsafe for women as state supports for their autonomy outside of the home are enhanced. It is not at all clear whether this trend is the creaking backlash of a dying patriarchy or an ideology resourcefully reorienting its force to the domestic sphere.

Women have historically been deemed responsible for the health of the nation and their failure to do so has historically rendered them pathological or diseased in the eyes of the social body. Jacqueline Rose notes the historical significance of psychoanalysis arriving at a moment when women hysterics were giving trouble to the ideological purchase of the social order. The hysteric was either the overeducated woman or the woman whose sexuality was uncontrolled and non-procreative (Rose, 1986, p. 96). Freud’s intervention in the field of hysteria enabled women to articulate their desire, which exceeded then, as it does now, social and ideological categories of bodily/reproductive and identitarian ascription. In psychoanalytic terms, there is no inscription of sexual difference in the unconscious that solidifies sexual or gender identity, which is why identity, in its unceasing failure, leans on the support of ideology, social practice, myth, convention, and legal frameworks. Women, in effect, embody or “reproduce” a problematic of identity that always exceeds identity categorisations including those defined by reproductive capability.

The advent of expanded rights and freedoms has implications for psychoanalytic clinical practice and a growing “legitimacy” is discernible to psychoanalytic practitioners for analysands in the articulating of reproductive issues such as abortion, diverse parenting practices including same sex parenting, and fertility. History, as outlined above, has been cruel to women who have not conformed to socially designated identity standards and have failed to embody being “holy Irish” or “wholly Irish.” But legitimacy is not equal to freedom. For women, their reproductive choices or lack of options constitute a repressed and symptomatic history and the work of “unrepressing” it is complicated, painful and subjectively determined. Now, as in Freud’s time, the analytic clinical setting is primed to support the articulation of the unconscious as both resistance and defence to identity and sexual difference. It is a place where women can take up the problematic of how identity fails to capture what a woman is. The same is true for men but female sexuality is especially invested with carrying/reproducing the health of the social order. The category of women, which is not reducible to internal or external mechanisms of identity, is a “failure” destined to endlessly repeat in individual histories.