Keywords

Introduction

On International Safe Abortion Day in 2019, one year and four months had passed since the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution was successfully repealed by 66 per cent of voters. The near-total ban on abortion had been removed at last. The March for Choice was organised for the seventh time in Dublin by the grassroots group Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC) with the banner No one left behind. With the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 in place, the banner confronted the shortcomings of the new legislation regulating access to abortion. The shortcomings include principally its gendered language, the twelve-week limit and a compulsory waiting period. These result in the exclusion of non-binary persons, trans men and everyone who cannot access abortion within these constraints and continue to depend on cross-border travel to access care. This in turn leaves behind persons in the asylum process who depend on state migration agencies to be granted a visa, as well as persons subject to intersecting forms of classed, racial and gendered marginalisation and oppression.

In the march I walked in solidarity with the migrant and ethnic minority bloc, which formed a large group of people of colour, queer, migrant and ethnic minority grassroots groups, activists, and allies like myself who called out,Verse

Verse No borders, no nations—stop deportations! No justice, no peace—no border police! When migrants’ rights are under attack—stand up, fight back!

The grassroots group Migrants and Ethnic-minorities for Reproductive Justice (MERJ) has been organising the bloc since they were formed in 2017. As the march called No one left behind—no one left behind! the bloc called out how borders and the threat of deportation produce reproductive injustice. By exploring their demands, I also explore the implications of bordering on realising reproductive justice in Ireland. Drawing on preliminary fieldwork conducted in Dublin and interviews conducted online with activists involved in repealing the 8th, this chapter engages with the implications of borders on access to and organising for reproductive justice. I investigate, first, how borders and bordering re/produce reproductive injustice in Ireland, and, second, the implications of these processes for organising in the final months of campaigning to remove the 8th Amendment, convened by Together for Yes.Footnote 1 Both the challenges posed to struggles for reproductive justice in the face of bordering and the organised resistance to these processes deserve a lot more attention than they have as yet been given.

Outline

Following a presentation of the material, methodology and a note on terminology, the chapter proceeds in three parts. Firstly, I present a theoretical framework on bordering and border-crossing. I then proceed to provide a brief background to the struggle for reproductive rights and historicise the emergence of stricter immigration laws, with a particular focus on the system of Direct Provision in Ireland. In the final part, I discuss the effects of bordering on the possibilities for political participation, and how borders are acknowledged and contested within the movement for reproductive rights and justice in Ireland.

Material and Methodology

In 2014, I travelled to Dublin to learn from an intergenerational and growing movement to legalise abortion. The death of Savita Halappanavar in a maternity hospital in Galway in 2012,Footnote 2 denied life-saving healthcare, sparked outrage and a historical momentum. Learning from this mounting and diversifying struggle, and the reproductive justice framework founded in the US in the 1980s, my attention shifted to how coloniality, precarisation and knowledge economies prescribe who has access to reproductive rights and spaces of resistance (see Bodelsson, 2018).

This chapter is grounded in a transnational feminist methodology, challenging a colonial, racial capitalist and ‘modern’ nation-state world order. In line with feminist postcolonial and Chicana feminist scholars, particularly Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), I understand borders to be colonial, raced and sexed markers of difference, simultaneously spatial and embodied. This informs how I understand the connection between borders, colonialism, gender and sexuality in an Irish context. Upon achieving national independence from Great Britain in 1922 as the Irish Free State, and in the process of recovering a national identity, women’s reproductive bodies and sexuality became important signifiers of difference. The ban on abortion, in place since British colonisation until 2018, became a marker of Irish national identity. Irishness was to signify purity, chastity, virtue, morality and respectability, in an agreement between church and state (Fischer, 2016; McAuliffe & Kennedy, 2017). To denaturalise borders in the Irish context thus entails highlighting the continuations of these differentiations along gendered, raced and sexed ideas of belonging.

While I did not participate on the ground to repeal the 8th, persons involved in the struggle have generously shared their knowledge, experiences and analysis in conversations and interviews. This chapter draws primarily on preliminary findings from fieldwork in Dublin and a visit to Belfast in September 2019, online interviews during March–June 2020Footnote 3 and secondary material documenting a central feature of the Irish state migration regime, the system of Direct Provision. The quoted participants Alice, Thomas, Cara and Inés have been pseudonymised. With this chapter, I hope to enter into dialogue with the participants’ accounts, together with previous and ongoing scholarly and activist writing, jointly producing knowledge around a complex and diverse movement.

Note on Terminology

Speaking of the movement for reproductive rights, I refer to all grassroots groups, organisations and individual activists who share a commitment to reproductive rights in Ireland in their diverse understandings, commitments and collaborative engagements. I thus use ‘reproductive rights’ as an umbrella term to refer to an array of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), in turn ‘related to multiple human rights, including the right to life, the right to be free from torture, the right to health, the right to privacy, the right to education, and the prohibition of discrimination’ (OHCHR).

Pro-choice is used by activists, grassroots groups and NGOs focused on removing legal (and often economic and geographical) obstacles to abortion care, as in the largest grassroots group Abortion Rights Campaign’s (ARC) call for ‘free, safe, legal and local’ abortion in Ireland.

Reproductive justice refers to the framework coined by indigenous women, women of colour, and trans women scholars, activists and activist scholars in the US (e.g. Luna, 2009; de Onís, 2015; Silliman et al., 2004; Davis, 2003; Ross, 2017). Grounded in a human rights framework, reproductive justice addresses prevailing colonial and racial injustices affecting reproductive health, decision-making and liveable lives. The framework has travelled across borders to make sense of locally specific and globally overarching reproductive injustices.Footnote 4

Theoretical Framework: Bordering and Border-Crossing

We need to change our views of borders and borderings from seeing them as operating on the margins of state and society to considering them major constitutive features of contemporary social, economic, and political dynamics. (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019: 161)

This claim, I find, underscores the importance of following the demands by the migrant and ethnic minority bloc to explore how bordering relates to reproductive injustice. Bordering can be defined as ‘a social practice of spatial differentiation’ (Van Houtom & Van Naerssen, 2002: 126). The concept points to the processual and temporal character through which states and supranational bodies determine ‘not only who is and who is not entitled to enter the country, but also whether those who do would be allowed to stay, work, and acquire civil, political, and social rights’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019: 5). Borders in the UK have become increasingly mobile and delocalised to target those deemed not to belong (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019). Over the last two decades, states have extended border controls and policing into an increasing number of spheres of life to limit and monitor persons’ rights to housing, education, employment and (particularly maternal) healthcare (e.g. Coddington, 2020, on UK; Messing et al., 2020; Hiemstra, 2021, on US). Everyday bordering illustrates how borders intrude into the lives of persons who are subjected to intersecting forms of oppression and state migration regimes.Footnote 5

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, bordering processes have become a major constitutive feature of Irish society. Ronit Lentin and Elena Moreo (2015: 901) argue that the vulnerability and precariousness of asylum-seekers in Ireland have been exacerbated as a result of the institutionalisation of the threat of deportation. They pinpoint the 2004 change in the citizenship law and the system of Direct Provision, to which I turn later, as the ‘innovations’ through which the Irish state has attempted ‘to overcome the “undeportability” of unwanted migrants’ (ibid.: 896). ‘Deportability’, the threat of deportation, coined by Nicholas De Genova (2002), works through and reconfigures intimate ties, which ‘include but extend beyond those that are recognized by the state’s construct of “family”’ (Luibhéid et al., 2017: 21).

In 2015, the International Protection Act was introduced in response to a rising critique against the fraught system of seeking asylum and Direct Provision in Ireland. Wendy Lyon (audio on Asylum Archive, no date) describes the ‘rushed’ process through which the 2015 Act went through the Oireachtas (Irish parliament), and how it heightened the number of asylum-seekers liable to deportability and dismantled the right to family reunification: ‘huge categories of family life has [sic] just been destroyed, with no debate’ (ibid.). Moreover, simultaneously with the hailed legalisation of same-sex marriage through a public vote in 2015, the Civil Registration (Amendment) Act 2014 went into effect. The Act worked ‘to make entering into a “sham marriage” more difficult, extending the power to registrars to refuse to perform international marriages if they suspect it was a “sham”’ (King-O’Riain, 2018: 501). As reflected above, bordering not only intrudes into the everyday and intimate spheres of targeted populations along imagined raced, gendered, sexed and legal-political borders but is tied to political projects of belonging. This aims to create a sense of belonging for some through ‘different constructions of identity, belonging, and citizenship’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019: 7; see also Luibhéid, 2018).

Paying Attention to Borders in Order to Transgress Them

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2003: 18) call to ‘pay[ing] attention to borders in order to transgress them’ is reiterated by Diana Mulinari and Lena Martinsson (2018). Building on and further diversifying the unbounded and contested politics and academic thinking of transnational feminism, their edited book Dreaming Global Change, Doing Local Feminism (2018) demonstrates the analytical potential of thinking through borders to acknowledge the border work of colonial legacies and their displacement through border struggles. Martinsson and Mulinari (2018: 5) attend to the emergence of a transnational sphere, simultaneously ‘transforming, complex and contradictory’, where colonial, imperial, raced and national borders and hierarchies both prevail and are contested. This is important to my understanding of borders as simultaneously embodied, spatial, situated and material, and reproduced and transgressed in feminist political practice.

Mohanty (1984, 2003) has famously challenged the theorising of a global feminism emerging in a ‘Western/Global North’ feminism (a political rather than a geographical location) in the 1980s, which she argues universalised gendered oppression and struggles. The global feminist scholars’ attempts to transcend ‘race, class, and national conflicts among women’, through the notion of universal sisterhood, work to strip women whose politics of location and history is different of their political agency (Mohanty, 2003: 114). The realities and political struggles are reduced to personal and ahistorical experiences, and ‘all conflicts among and within women are flattened’ (ibid.). According to Mohanty (2003: 10), a transnational feminism requires ‘the building of an ethics of crossing cultural, sexual, national, class, and racial borders’. This ethics requires paying attention to the differences in our ‘politics of location’, which involves historicising the ‘experience of the self […] before it can be generalised into a collective vision’ (Mohanty, 2003: 122). Only then can experience ‘become the basis of feminist solidarity and struggle’ (ibid.). The critique against transcending difference, and Mohanty’s call to develop an ethics of crossing, are of central importance in the ensuing parts of this chapter. I employ Mohanty’s concept of border-crossing to elucidate how grassroots groups and activists pay attention to borders and differences in politics of location to build forms of solidarity and collaboration across parallel and intersecting social justice issues.

Repealing the 8th and the Struggle for Reproductive Rights in Ireland

On May 25, 2018, the 8th Amendment of the Constitution was repealed through a public vote. This historical day followed upon years of radical organising for abortion rights and reproductive justice and decades of intergenerational organising within the women’s movement. The repeal of the 8th was a victory that can only be attributed to this diversity of feminist, women’s and trans rights activists who have been organising vigils, protests, demonstrations and performances, and been talking with families, friends, neighbours and strangers. To understand the complex trajectory of the movement, there is a wealth of writing on the movement’s history (e.g. Smyth, 1988, 2005; Fletcher, 2005), on the repeal of the 8th (Calkin et al., 2020; Fitzsimons & Kennedy, 2021) and writings reflecting diverse positionalities and translocal dialogues (e.g. Floresco et al., 2018), and the eventual constitutional process of repealing the 8th (de Londras & Enright, 2018). These constitute but a fraction of the writings that jointly do justice to the movement’s genealogy and diversity.

The abortion ban has been in place since British colonisation (the Offences Against the Person Act in 1861) and was constitutionally enshrined through the 8th Amendment in 1983. As Ireland gained independence as the Irish Free State in 1922, abortion discourses were central to the constitution of an Irish national identity (Fletcher, 2005; Smyth, 1998). The repeal of the 8th historically removed an amendment which equalled the foetus’ ‘right to life’ to the life of pregnant persons. However, the new Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 is widely acknowledged as ‘deeply problematic’ (Calkin et al., 2020: 5). Legal scholar Fiona de Londras states that ‘pregnant people are still not recognised as full constitutional rights bearers’ under the Act of 2018 (de Londras, 2020). Following a few months with this legislation, MERJ published a statement highlighting the continuing dependence on cross-border travel, particularly as it restricts access for persons in the asylum process who depend on the UK Home Office to be granted a visa (MERJ, September 2019a). The UK-based NGO Abortion Support Network (ASN) continues to support persons who need to travel from Ireland to access abortion (ASN, 2018).

When the date of the referendum on the 8th Amendment was announced, the movement temporarily reorganised as the national civil society campaign Together for Yes (TfY). After ‘intensive negotiations’, the largest abortion rights grassroots group the Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC), the non-governmental organisation the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) and the Coalition to repeal the 8th Amendment agreed to form TfY (Barron, 2019: 8). While the campaign was successful in organising and canvassing across Ireland, leading to a landslide vote in May 2018 in favour of repealing the abortion ban, aspects of the campaign strategy have been contested. In the interviews, the notion of ‘Middle Ireland’ is mentioned to refer to ‘an imagined Ireland’, which the campaign sought to reach. The strategy aimed to speak to the ‘undecided’ through ‘a softer, gentler, reasoned approach’ (Griffin et al., 2019: 55). This approach has been critiqued for its disregard of trans persons (see Trans Voices for Repeal, 2018) and non-citizens’ rights, as is elaborated upon later. To locate the participants’ reflections and other accounts of the campaign, we need to turn briefly to the constitution of an imagined gendered, sexed and raced national identity through Ireland’s complex history of colonisation, independence and nation-building.

Bordering and Reproductive Injustice

Throughout Europe’s ‘modern’ history, women’s bodies have been subject to hierarchisation along racial and ethnic lines, wherein racialised and minority women have been deemed a threat to the national ‘collectivity’ (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1989). Women and persons marked ‘outside’ the nation have been discouraged from or forcibly denied making informed decisions regarding their bodies (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 29, 30). In the process of creating the modern nation-state in Europe, eugenics was used to legitimise the ‘improvement’ of populations. In the 1920s and 1930s, sterilisation, forced adoption and using women as test subjects for contraception were introduced in Europe and North America (see Ross, 2017). Yet, as calls to legalise abortion grew in the women’s movement across Europe and in North America in the 1960s and 1970s, the parallel racial and colonial reproductive oppression and resistance of racialised, indigenous and minority women were largely ignored (Vergès, 2020; Davis, 2003).

The history of Ireland as formerly colonised by Great Britain, yet implicated in colonisation, and a country of emigration following independence, has produced a specific relation to race and racism in Ireland, engendering ‘the belief that the Irish are incapable of racism’ (McVeigh 1992, cited in Lentin, 2006: 202). Eithne Luibhéid (2013) shows how women’s reproduction and sexuality have been at the centre of British colonialism and the shifting dynamics of race and nation-building in Ireland. During British colonisation, Irish women working in low-wage occupations in Great Britain were deemed ‘excessively fertile’ and accused of causing ‘racial degeneration’ (Walter 2001, cited in Luibhéid, 2013: 33). Irish women’s reproduction was deemed to pose ‘a threat to the English way of life’ (ibid.) and the ‘Irish’ were constructed as a ‘degenerate race’ (McClintock, 1995: 52). Responding to British colonialist logic, following partitioning and independence as the Irish Free State, Irishness was enshrined in the Constitution as settled (excluding MincéiriFootnote 6), white and Catholic and women’s roles as child-bearers and wives (Luibhéid, 2013: 35). In the Irish nation’s imaginary, ‘immigrant, Black, Jewish, and Traveller women were not generally the women whose childbearing was envisioned as perpetuating the nation’ (ibid.). Whereas the abortion ban was safeguarded as contrary to ‘Irish womanhood’ in post-independence nation-building, Irish Traveller (also referred to as Mincéiri) women’s reproduction was constructed as excessive and deemed an internal national ‘threat’ (ibid.). Women facing pregnancies outside marriage or homosexual men and women resorted to emigration to avoid criminalisation and intervention such as the Magdalene laundries, further reinforcing ‘the modern Irish [heteronormative] sexual order’ (Luibhéid, 2013: 37).

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Ireland emerged as ‘a beacon of neoliberal practice’, known as the Celtic Tiger years (Fraser et al., 2013: 40). During years of intense deregulation and privatisation (ibid.), the independent state experienced its first net immigration, and the Irish immigration regime became one of ‘the strictest in Europe’ (Fernando, 2017: 7). Bordering processes emerged from and are intimately connected to neoliberal globalisation (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019). Luibhéid (2013) shows how the political shift to a stricter migration regime and the nation’s reinvention depended on women’s reproductive bodies. Racialised pregnant persons were targeted in racist campaigns and systematically accused by the Minister of Justice of ‘flooding’ into maternity hospitals.Footnote 7 This enabled the removal of the jus soli policy (granting Irish-born children of non-citizens Irish citizenship) in 2004 and the covert introduction of the system of Direct Provision in 2000.

Direct Provision: ‘A Prison with Invisible Walls’

In 2000, the Irish government introduced a system whereby persons who apply for leave to remain in Ireland were located outside the Irish welfare system. The system, called ‘Direct Provision’, was led by the fear that the UK’s 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, introducing a similar system, would push more asylum-seekers to go to Ireland (Fanning & Michael, 2019). Direct Provision is a scheme of providing involuntary housing in hostels and prefabricated buildings dispersed across the country. The centres are managed by private for-profit companies but administered by the government’s Reception and Integration Agency (RIA). Applying for leave to remain in Ireland, persons are assigned to a centre located ‘on the outskirts of society’ (Nedeljković, 2018: 289). Every week, residents can be involuntarily transferred to a new location, resulting in numerous upheavals and relocations (Conlon, 2013). Relocations have also been attested by residents as being used as punishment for not ‘comply[ing] with “the rules of the RIA”’, such as returning late to the centre (Conlon & Gill, 2013: 250). Residents are supervised with CCTV cameras installed in communal areas,Footnote 8 many centres impose curfews, and visitors are signed in and out.Footnote 9 Direct Provision denies access to private housing, employment and health requirements (e.g. nutritious food, mobility and privacy) and indirectly circumscribes access to healthcare.

Waiting for a decision and/or as a result of the lack of affordable housing in Ireland’s cities, many stay for more than seven years.Footnote 10 The indefinite time of waiting for a decision on the asylum application has proven to cause and aggravate physical and mental health issues. During the two decades of its existence, the inhumane system has not escaped critique or resistance by persons enduring the system, from civil society, activists and researchers. Below is the beginning of an autobiographical text entitled ‘The disappearance of the old Railway hotel [sic]’ written by ‘the former resident of the Railway hostel’, published on Asylum Archive.Footnote 11 The text captures the multiple layers of everyday bordering in Direct Provision:

Tired and blurred with postnatal emotions, a two-week old baby in hand, the 30th of august, 2005 was not in any way a day for me to celebrate change.

A transfer letter had arrived for reference no.69/****/05B—a transfer to THE OLD RAILWAY HOTEL, Kiltimagh, and Co. Mayo.

It was the beginning of a yet-to-end journey into the direct provision centre, the start of several signed documents by the department of justice, equality and law reform, [of] which the reception and integration agency was an affiliate.

Exasperated from the sudden move, I arrived [at] the accommodation centre with no expectations, yet nothing was as bare as the quiet story [sic] with a rusted signpost.

Unaware at that instance that what was called the direct provision centre would turn out to be a prison with invisible walls.

The anti-racist activist and scholar Ronit Lentin (2020: 273) argues that Direct Provision can be understood as an Irish version of Angela Davis’s ‘prison industrial complex’, given how Direct Provision is a source of wealth for private companies, and a function of the Irish state to disappear people deemed to embody problems. Likewise, Nilmini Fernando (2017) names Direct Provision as a form of racialised incarceration as the majority of the residents are from African countries, mirroring a larger pattern in Western necropolitical migration policies.

Bordering and Access to Reproductive Healthcare

Since residents in Direct Provision are deprived of facilities to cook their own food (Barry, 2014) and served canteen food three times a day, malnutrition among pregnant persons and babies is common (Fanning et al., 2001). To cover needs and essentials other than food, residents are given a weekly allowance, currently €29.80 for children and €38.80 for adults. Moreover, access to maternal healthcare such as antenatal care has been reported as difficult due to inter alia the cost of travelling and inadequate childcare (Kennedy & Murphy-Lawless, 2003: 46). In an interview, human rights advocate Inés (April 2020) attests to the continuing inaccessibility of healthcare to residents:

Women, they don’t go regularly as they should when they are pregnant to get scanned, to pick up abnormalities; abnormalities are picked up later because you don’t have that facility available as often as it should be. […] And even the cervical cancer testing that has been happening, no one will come into the refugee camps to say, ‘You know what, this cervical cancer testing that is available free if you qualify for it.’ […] You have an organisation coming at different times, but it is not an organisation that is addressing the sexual and reproductive health advice for women.

Inés refers to Direct Provision centres as refugee camps and testifies to how women have been denied appropriate or qualitative care when seeking it. The legal scholar Liam Thornton (2013, 2016) argues that introducing the Direct Provision system placed asylum-seekers outside Irish welfare law. With its intention to reduce the number of persons seeking asylum in Ireland, persons seeking asylum ‘do not enjoy full access to social assistance payments and supports under Irish social welfare law’ (Thornton, 2013: 7; see also Fanning, 2016: 13). While medical care is to be provided to asylum-seekers free of charge, the system aggravates mental and physical health and prevents (e.g. through geographical dispersal, involuntary transfer or barriers mentioned by Inés above) access to healthcare services.Footnote 12

Moreover, with the 2004 Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, Ireland is following a broader trend in the EU wherein undocumented persons’ access to healthcare has been restricted to ‘emergency health care’ (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2018). Ireland is included on the list of the seventeen EU member states requiring ‘undocumented migrant women to cover the costs of some, or in most cases all, maternal health care themselves’ (ibid.: 33).Footnote 13 Ireland and four other member states allow undocumented migrant persons ‘access to free or subsidised healthcare during labour, childbirth and/or in obstetric emergencies’, excluding antenatal and postnatal care (ibid.). Keygnaert et al. (2014: 218) argue that ‘the overall policy focus at both European and MS [member state] levels undoubtedly remains on controlling migration flows’, and universal healthcare access ‘is now often considered a State charity or generosity’. This is even more alarming considering the disparities in maternal mortality rates, often brought to attention by MERJ and supported by the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths and Morbidity report Saving Lives, Improving Mother’s Care (2021),Footnote 14 indicating a sizeably higher risk of maternal mortality for migrant and racialised pregnant persons.

The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018

As a human rights advocate, Inés was involved in repealing the 8th Amendment. She finds the new legislation inadequate to provide persons in Direct Provision with abortion care. The most central issue that Inés raises is conscientious objection, which results in ‘too few GPs [general practitioners] that offer abortion’. As mentioned earlier, Direct Provision centres are dispersed across the country, often located on the outskirts of towns and cities. Inés says that in cases where towns have access to only one GP, what if ‘it is a GP who says no, who is anti-abortion? […] That community now has to travel in order to be able to access [them].’ An issue that limits access further is the three-day mandatory waiting period following consultation. Inés explains:

I should come in and tell you I need to do an abortion. All the doctor needs to determine is, you know, how many weeks and, if it is within the qualifying time, that I can still safely abort the child. And to travel back and forth, because those back-and-forth[s] can be stressful. Sometimes some women won’t go for that option because, I think, of that consultation process you can also find yourselves in where a GP—you have already made a decision and they try to confuse you and try to make you keep the child, you know. […] Many women will definitely not go through that consultation process, like the women that come as refugees: they will find it, you know, a bit scary to talk to a GP once and then come back and then eventually, you know, be able to abort. They will be trying to find other ways.

The interview with Inés actualises issues that have been raised by various grassroots groups and activists who stood by and fought for a repeal of the 8th Amendment. The critique concerns the arbitrary cut-off period at twelve weeks, the mandatory waiting period of three days, and the possibility for medical practitioners to object to performing abortions. The arbitrary cut-off period at twelve weeks, combined with the continued criminalisation of healthcare staff (risking fourteen years in jail), has further led to a ‘chilling effect’ and different interpretations of the legislation. As noted by the Abortion Rights Campaign (March 21, 2019),

One month after the introduction of legal abortion, Dr. Fergal Malone, Master and CEO of the Rotunda Maternity Hospital in Dublin, explained that the hospital was limiting its early abortion service to 11 weeks LMP instead of 12, because, ‘the legislation is written with an upper limit of 12 weeks and zero days. But there is considerable ambiguity as to whether 12 weeks means the date at which the termination starts, or the date at which the termination ends.’

While abortion is available safely and for free to a majority of persons who need it before the cut-off at twelve or eleven weeks, the gendered wording of ‘woman’ in the Act excludes trans and non-binary persons from accessing abortion care (de Londras, 2019). Moreover, delay in providing care within the limit pushes people into a ‘hyper-restrictive legal regime’ where one is most likely ‘“disqualified” for lawful abortion care’ (de Londras, 2020: 43). This is particularly harmful for persons whose access depends on the funds and support of friends, grassroots groups and NGOs to leave one’s home or a Direct Provision centre and travel at least twice to a GP who provides abortion care, and whose cross-border travel depends on the transnational migration regime (UK and Ireland) to grant a visa.

Challenges and Hopes of Realising Reproductive Justice

I have so far explored how processes of bordering constitute continuations of the colonial, racial, gendered and sexed borders of Irish nation-building and are materialised in differentiated and circumscribed access to reproductive rights. I now proceed to explore how bordering affects political organising, both at large and during the national civil society campaign TfY. I conclude with how the interview participants imagine change beyond repeal.

Political Organising and Deportability

During a solidarity event organised by a radical queer grassroots group in September 2019, two panellists from the grassroots group Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland (MASI) spoke about the challenges of being politically active and identifying as queer or a woman while living in Direct Provision centres (field notes, September 2019).Footnote 15 They explained that Direct Provision nurtures hostility and fear among the centres’ residents. To be openly LGBTQ+ while politically active can result in social exclusion. One of them said, ‘I only return to the centre to sleep.’ The activists, who have been visibly engaging in political movements, emphasise that it is the system that creates this environment. This system, as outlined above, functions through dispersion, isolation and punishment.

The human rights advocate Inés argues that fearing reprisals as a migrant with a precarious legal status was also a barrier to engaging in the campaign to repeal the 8th. While Inés herself was involved in repeal, she said,

You have more fears, more than everybody else. I mean, me too, when I advocate. I used to take a back seat because I knew that I am a migrant, but you grow with time and understand that there is no right that is for migrants only and those for citizens. There are rights for everybody, and everybody has a right to those basic rights and access those basic rights. They should not be violated and, if they are violated, you need to speak out.

The fear, Inés continues, concerns whether political involvement will affect a person’s asylum claim or will lead to deportation as undocumented. Hence, deportability produces fear of being politically involved, which in tandem with the conditions of living in the Direct Provision system may nurture the hostile environment described by the panellists. During the movement to repeal the 8th, Inés acknowledges that, as a result of these fears, ‘we were not putting our voice so much out there as we should, as many as we are’. However, in the informal conversation with Cara and in the interview with Alice, both members of the affected-led grassroots group MERJ, they speak of the significant increase in the presence of organised racism and fascism, and in particular how individuals from fascist organisations attend events organised by people of colour-led grassroots groups. The rising mobilisation of fascist and racist groups in Ireland through party politics such as the National Party, Irexit and Identity Ireland reflects the growth of neo-conservative and far-right organising across Europe, attempting to silence particularly LGBTQ+, people of colour and anti-racist and anti-fascist activism (e.g. Bachetta, 2017).

Borders of Together for Yes

Thomas is an activist who was involved in repealing the 8th. He has also been involved in a number of grassroots groups before and following repeal. Thomas acknowledged the ambivalence of activists involved in the campaign Together for Yes who lack Irish citizenship:

an awful lot of migrant women and migrant people who were involved in the campaign, knowing full well that they weren’t gonna be … number one, that they weren’t gonna be given the opportunity to vote, and that realistically the legislation wasn’t going to protect them either. I think that people abroad and people over here really were denied those citizen rights,Footnote 16 you know, weren’t represented in voting and things like that. It just does, it creates this kind of history of like legitimate citizenhood and who gets to call themselves Irish. And Irish abroad are still always Irish, you know what I mean, and it’s all tied up in whiteness, like racism that I think Ireland has a really complex history with.

The question of ‘who gets to call themselves Irish’, voiced here by Thomas, runs through the interviews and conversations. In conversation with Cara, she says that ‘feminist and migrant groups are considered less able to contribute’, particularly those ‘who are not from here’. Paola Rivetti (2019) argues that the referendum on the 8th and the following legislation failed to ‘reconfigure Irish identity’, constructed as ‘white, Catholic and settled’. Rivetti (2019: 183) writes further that the campaign narrative centred on Irish women who travel across the border for abortions in the UK while migrant women unable to travel remained ‘largely invisible’. In other words, the political struggle of women historically and continuously deemed outside the Irish national imaginary, ‘immigrant, Black, Jewish, and Traveller women’ according to Luibhéid (2013: 35), were located outside the movement as the workings of raced, gendered and sexed borders remained largely unacknowledged leading up to the referendum. Adding to this is the fear mentioned by Inés of potential reprisals for being politically active. Feminist postcolonial scholars writing in a Nordic context have contested the borders reproduced within women’s movements that align with an imagined ‘national history’ (de Los Reyes et al., 2003). While collective knowledge, resources and legitimacy built over time are a strength in women’s movements, racial, gendered (and ageist) boundaries of belonging and entitlement are simultaneously reproduced (de Los Reyes et al., 2003: 15; Liinason & Meijer, 2018; Cuesta & Mulinari, 2018).

Thomas pointed to the paradox of ‘who gets to call themselves Irish’, wherein Irish abroad ‘are always Irish’ whereas non-citizens or people of colour in Ireland are not. In Ireland, as in large parts of Europe, citizens of colour remain ‘hyphenated citizens’ (Otukoya, 2019). This is further reflected in the constitutional process and campaign to repeal the 8th. Critical legal scholar Fiona de Londras (2019, 2020), who was involved in repeal, has written detailed accounts on the formal process of amending constitutional law. Her engagement with the legal and governmental process of reforming constitutional law illustrates the challenges of realising radical change through the state. While the Citizen’s Assembly recommendations on the 8th Amendment were welcomed as surprisingly far-reaching, ‘[p]roposed reforms were incrementally made more and more conservative as they moved forward from demands on the streets to compromises in the Cabinet room’ (2020: 39). Throughout the formal process,

there was very little engagement with the realities of reproductive life for women of colour, migrants, Traveller women, women with disabilities, trans people, and women living in situations of reproductive coercion. (de Londras, 2019)

Alice and Thomas both discuss the strategy of the campaign TfY to reach out to ‘Middle Ireland’. While Thomas acknowledges that this strategy might have been necessary ‘to achieve what we did’, he also perceives within the campaign,

a sense of frustration of where the narrative went. […] I could see it kind of coming from a mile away, in the way that they […] were empowering people to canvass and speak about it. It was very much framed in the idea of the good abortion and in terms of kind of, that was fatal foetal abnormality, it would be white middle-class women who in any other circumstance would have had the child. And obviously, I know that that sentiment appeals to people, it appeals to the likes of Middle Ireland, who were a lot of my family, who would have been very staunch ‘noes’ coming from a religious point of view.

Members of the grassroots group MERJ have been critical of the notion of ‘Middle Ireland’. As Alice describes, this notion was key to the exclusion of migrant voices within the campaign:

Whenever we raised issues that affected migrants or about migrant inclusion, we were kind of brushed aside. It was this notion of ‘Middle Ireland’, like this enclosed racist group that wouldn’t sympathise [with migrants], which I don’t think is true.

In the book It’s a Yes: How Together for Yes Repealed the 8th and Transformed Irish Society (Griffin et al., 2019), the leaders of the campaign share the process of forming TfY and developing a strategy to speak to ‘the undecided’. As soon as 2015, the director of a design and advertising agency was approached to begin research for a referendum campaign, which concluded that

after decades of polarisation it was vital to listen to and talk calmly with people who were undecided, and trust them to come to their own conclusions. Empathy was key. People did care. (Ibid.: 55)

However, the dominant narrative of TfY has been contested for centring on a white, settled and Catholic subject (Rivetti, 2019), a middle-class identity (Holland, 2018), and leaving out ‘the messier edges of the campaign, from the places where multiple oppressions occur’ (Burns 2018, cited in Duffy, 2020: 78; see also de Londras & Markicevic, 2018: 96). Alice spoke of the issues concerning showing to women ‘compassion and care’, which was central to the campaign message. This framing of abortion signalled that

it wasn’t considered a fundamental, basic right. […] it has contributed to that whole narrative of putting the power in the hands of doctors, but [that] it should be trusted. Yeah, taking away the agency and creating a power imbalance. And, I guess, it also created a notion of this ‘good abortion’ and the ‘bad abortion’.

By promoting a narrative of a ‘good abortion’, Thomas thinks that TfY failed to open up a conversation regarding ‘whom we value’ in Irish society:

I think that there was a big loss of opportunity to actually have more of a dialogue about whom we value, as seen as legitimate women in Irish society. ’Cause we knew from research that people most predominantly affected were working-class women, were migrant women, and those voices just weren’t being platformed by that major body.

Thomas spoke as well of the lack of conversation around trans parenthood and trans womanhood, saying, ‘It ceased to be kind of this big question of reproductive justice and who gets to—like who is a valid parent? […] “if I can’t fulfil this expectation of motherhood, like what is my relationship to womanhood?”’ In line with Paola Rivetti (2019), Thomas identifies a failure to reconfigure who is ‘valued’ in Irish society, which is not only imagined (and constitutionally enshrined) as white, settled (locating Irish Travellers/Mincéiri ‘outside’ ‘Irishness’) and Catholic but also heteronormative and cisnormative. The reproductive justice framework, as developed in the US by women of colour for whom ‘the issue of abortion has always been a double-sided coin’ (the magazine FOWAAD!, cited in Lonergan, 2012: 33), has challenged how a focus on removing legal obstacles to abortion has tended to evade an analysis of how colonialism and ‘racial patriarchy’ subjects women and persons of colour to reproductive oppression and violence (Vergès, 2020: 90). Whereas this was the aim of the temporary campaign TfY, the reproductive rights movement in its diversity moves beyond a sole focus on legal change, acknowledging that ‘law alone would never be enough’ (Calkin et al., 2020: 1).

However, deliberations in the wake of repealing the 8th reflect how the nation’s imagined borders continue to determine who is deemed to belong and to be worthy of rights. As the campaign TfY focused on legislative change, it failed to challenge the legal-territorial raced, gendered and sexed borders of the ‘nation’. As such, differences could be transcended through the idea of a ‘universal’ female subject, constructed as white, Irish and middle class (Mohanty, 2003). Although differences were acknowledged (through what the interviews attest to as the exclusion of subjects who would not appeal to ‘Middle Ireland’), a ‘shared oppression’ (ibid.), as in the 8th Amendment of the Constitution, enabled an outwardly ‘unified’ campaign. However, this unification hid the multiple politics of location in relation to the struggle and to borders and bordering existing within the movement. Hence, I now proceed to discuss a few examples of border-crossing for reproductive justice.

Transgressing Borders Beyond Repeal

Following ten months with the new legislation on abortion, MERJ hosted the workshop ‘Challenging white feminism: Moving beyond the politics of Together for Yes’. In the workshop, the attendance and voices of migrants were prioritised. The event was organised to create a space for ‘building and learning in an intentional way’ (MERJ, October 2019b). One member introduced the event by stating:

The exclusion of migrant voices within the Together for Yes campaign was and is a symptom of a larger problem of white feminism in Ireland and has left dangerous tangible consequences for those same voices that were left out of the debate. […] Today is the time to reflect and put the practices of solidarity into action. To challenge feminism in Ireland and to not just be more inclusive, but for it to be equally anti-capitalist and anti-racist.

During the ‘open mic’ session, the complex nature of reproductive justice was illustrated through the stories being shared about ‘daily abuses’ and ‘everyday struggles’ by persons who live in Direct Provision, says Cara who participated. This urged MERJ to create other spaces of sharing, such as a ‘care day’ for people of colour on March 8, 2020.

Inés has been actively working to restore relationships of trust and building connections to counter the violations of rights in Direct Provision. She started a cooking initiative in response to the denial of permission to residents to cook their own food. When asking the management of the Direct Provision centre for permission to cook, the residents had consistently received a ‘No. No, no, no. Canteen food or no food.’Footnote 17 Inés reached out to a community centre and a local church, which supported her initiative with a meeting space. She says that the group has become a space for community-building and restoring trust for persons living in Direct Provision, since ‘food is a language we all understand, and food brings communities together’. Inés has become an important link between people who live in Direct Provision, grassroots groups and non-governmental organisations. She has

developed good relationships with individuals within the community that I am close to after many years in Ireland, with the trust and confidence they have in me and being able to go out there, put myself out there whenever that is necessary.

One of the grassroots groups that Inés has built important connections with is MERJ, whose members she ‘spoke to about the challenges with sexual health and the reproductive rights of people living in Direct Provision as refugees or asylum-seekers’. She says that MERJ took on ‘a very important role in that they referred them to individuals who could advise them’. Speaking to Inés, it becomes clear that, however important repeal was to her, commitment to human rights, the in-community work and being a link to people who reside in Direct Provision is as much about ‘saving lives’. Speaking about the importance of her role, Inés says:

They will not go out, but they will come to me, and they know me, I have a voice. In fact, if they are coming to you, you have saved a life.

Looking ahead, Thomas says that trans and queer parenthood and trans health need to be a part of the conversation to challenge ideas of ‘who gets to parent’. He discusses the limits of realising political change through referenda, saying that ‘it’s amazing the power that [a vote] has over people’s imagination for another situation’, and yet ‘you do the best with the options that you have in the moment of time’. Comparing TfY to Yes Equality (the campaign to legalise same-sex marriage in 2015), he thinks both campaigns have been ‘possessed’ by the imagery of the ‘family unit’ and failed to challenge the ties to the state and church. He says:

I suppose in our striving for justice, I felt—I see it as the right of people to have children and to have them in a safe environment and […] like liveable lives, like lives that are even more liveable, you know, that are fully realised and that they are flourishing.

Finally, realising reproductive justice in Ireland must involve an end to Direct Provision and make affordable housing available, all participants agree. Alice says:

After repeal, we kind of felt that the discussion around reproductive justice needs to continue but it needs to include other aspects as well. […] obviously, we get a lot of people asking us about how to get an abortion; particularly migrants have a difficult documentation … but we have also been working a lot with other movements like ending Direct Provision and the housing movement. So, we have kind of been focusing on those aspects more and I guess in general we have had to take a more anti-racist, general anti-fascist approach. Because the far-right is being very bold here. So, I guess our future plan has included that more than the issue around abortion in particular. […] We have been more focused on the wider issue of reproductive justice.

Concluding Reflections

Building on ongoing conversations and contestations following the historical repeal of the 8th, I sought in this chapter to centre on the demands made by the migrant and ethnic minority bloc during the March for Choice in 2019. Their attention to the implications of state borders for reproductive justice led me to explore further the connections between the historical constitution of a national identity constructed around the gendered, raced, sexed reproductive body, to contemporary bordering processes and borders reproduced in political organising. Undoubtedly, the reproductive body remains raced, sexed and gendered under the current abortion law. Bodies remain differently governed through the system of Direct Provision, which seeks to locate some outside spatially and legally but, luckily, fails to do so politically. The participants’ accounts of how the borders of an ‘imagined’ white, Catholic, settled and cisnormative Ireland were reproduced during the TfY campaign illustrate the difficulty and necessity of employing what Mohanty (2003: 10) calls ‘the building of an ethics of crossing cultural, sexual, national, class, and racial borders’, especially in calling for legal change in dialogue with the bordering state.

I want to conclude by asking the following forward-looking questions: What would it mean to locate borders at the centre of political analysis in the continuing organising for reproductive rights in Ireland and in parallel reproductive rights struggles? How might an ethics of crossing borders be built into organising as bordering processes circumscribe persons’ access to rights? I would like to suggest that these questions, and the border-crossing struggles from which they emerge, deserve more attention not only in Ireland but in the growing number of contexts where rights are circumscribed in state political projects of belonging and deservedness. The struggles and political analysis emerging at these borders and responding to bordering provide hope for transnational feminist struggles that contest the situated, legal-political and everyday spatial and embodied dimensions of reproductive injustice.