This book reframes the Irish abortion narrative within the history of women’s reproductive health and explores the similarities and differences that shaped the history of abortion within the two states on the island of Ireland. Since the legalisation of abortion in Britain in 1967, an estimated 200,000 women have travelled from Ireland to England for an abortion. However, this abortion trail is at least a century old and began with women migrating to Britain to flee moral intolerance in Ireland towards unmarried mothers and their offspring. This study highlights how attitudes to unmarried motherhood reflected a broader cultural acceptance that morality should trump concerns regarding maternal health. This rationale bled into social and political responses to birth control and abortion and was underpinned by an acknowledgement that in prioritising morality some women would die.

Available Open Access under CC-BY licence. Irish law currently permits abortion only where the life of the pregnant woman is at risk. Since 1983, the 8th Amendment to the Constitution has recognised the “unborn” as having a right to life equal to that of the “mother”. Consequently, most people in Ireland who wish to bring their pregnancies to an end either import the abortion pill illegally, travel abroad to access abortion, or continue with the pregnancy against their will. Now, however, there are signs of change. A constitutional referendum will be held in 2018, after which it will be possible to reimagine, redesign, and reform the law on abortion. Written by experts in the field, this book draws on experience from other countries, as well as experiences of maternal medical care in Ireland, to call for a feminist, woman-centered, and rights-based radical new approach to abortion law in Ireland. Directly challenging grounds-based abortion law, this accessible guide brings together feminist analysis, comparative research, human rights law, and political awareness to propose a new constitutional and legislative settlement on reproductive autonomy in Ireland. It offers practical proposals for policymakers and advocates, including model legislation, making it an essential campaigning tool leading up to the referendum.

This book asks the crucial question of how it came to pass that on the 25 May 2018, the Irish electorate voted by a landslide in favour of changing its abortion legislation that, for the previous thirty-five years, had been one of the most restrictive regimes in Europe. The author shows how, alongside traditional campaigning tactics such as street demonstrations, door-to-door canvassing, and the distribution of pro-choice merchandise and information leaflets, a key strategy of pro-choice advocacy groups was to encourage first-person abortion story-sharing by women in their efforts to repeal the Eighth Amendment, which had effectively banned abortion provision in the country. The book argues that a normalizing of abortion talk took place in the lead-up to the referendum, with women speaking publicly in unprecedented numbers about their abortion histories. These women storytellers were mirroring certain pro-choice movements in other contexts, where a new ‘sound it loud, say it proud’ narrative around abortion experiences has emerged as a central contemporary strategy for destigmatizing abortion discourse. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including law, gender studies, sociology, and human geography, will find this book of interest.

This book looks at the recent history of sex, contraception, and abortion in Australia’s most conservative state, Queensland. In western nations, there has largely been a consistent increase in available contraception and access to abortion from the 1960s onwards, yet there are a few geographical exceptions that resisted this trend, including Queensland. Cassandra Byrnes highlights the multifarious ways sexuality and reproduction were continually constructed and challenged during the second half of the twentieth century and follows the responses of key groups to changing laws and attitudes in a time of local and global sexual and social revolutions. She explores interactions between identities of gender, sexuality, class, age, marital status, and geography to illustrate how specific sexed bodies became liminal sites for legal and medical debate. This Queensland case study is contextualised within international debates concerning women’s reproductive rights and will be of interest to students and scholars interested in the history of reproductive rights, gender, and sexuality.

Spanning the island of Ireland over three centuries, this first history of Irish divorce places the human experience of marriage breakdown centre stage to explore the impact of a highly restrictive and gendered law, and its reform, on Irish society.

For more than a generation, activists and advocacy organizations have been instrumental in agitating for women's health reforms in Ireland. Over the last decade, Irish activists have experienced a number of victories to improve women's health, most notably in 2018 when Ireland passed a referendum to repeal the Eighth amendment, a constitutional ban on abortion. After years of unfavorable laws for women and successive scandals in women's health, Ireland has taken transformative steps to redefine social norms surrounding women's health and reproduction. The case of Ireland's women's health reform offers important insight toward furthering the modern global movement for women's autonomy. Catching Fire narrates the rise of women's health activism in Ireland within a global reproductive justice framework, which aims to understand and dismantle the systems of social inequality that shape, oppress, and restrict reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. The volume focuses on attempts by Irish healthcare reformers and activists to improve Irish women's access to essential healthcare services and links key developments in Irish history to reproductive advocacy efforts in America and beyond. Chapters offer historical context behind the modern reproductive justice movement through case studies on women's health issues such as contraception, abortion, and childbirth in Ireland. Together, these case studies celebrate the ingenuity of Irish activists who personalized reproductive justice through the stories of ordinary women on social media and established the Republic of Ireland as a model for future activist movements. Reaching across groups and eras, Catching Fire highlights the underrecognized historical feminist movements supporting recent women's health activism and the enduring lessons for achieving greater gender equity around the globe.

The first history of contraception in twentieth-century Ireland to explore the lived experiences of Irish men and women and activists.