Fetal Ireland: National Bodies and Political Agency

Abstract

Unionists must ensure that nationalists don't outnumber them. On other side, what are we confined to--outbreeding them? What are our choices? Either we shoot them or we outbreed them. There's no politics here. It's a numbers game. BERNADETTE DEVLIN McALISKEY, NORTHERN IRISH ACTIVIST (1) Interpreting boundaries ... is a way to contest them, not to record their fixity in natural world. Like penetrating Cuban territory with reconnaissance satellites and Radio Marti, treating a fetus as if it were outside a woman's body, because it can be viewed, is a political act. ROSALIND POLLACK PETCHESKY, AMERICAN FEMINIST SCHOLAR (2) INTRODUCTION BORDERS MATTER. Critical theory has pushed borders, examined borders, realigned them, transgressed them, exploded them. The border is a way to imagine limits of power, mobility, and body in space. But borders are, of course, more than abstractions. National borders do exist and, as is clear in Northern Ireland, are often contested and policed. Another such border is that which defines limits of a woman's body. Women's bodies, to use a now-hackneyed phrase, are battlegrounds. The particular aptness of this metaphor is clear to anyone who has participated in or witnessed an abortion clinic defense/siege. Not only are street, parking lot, and/or clinic ground on which battle is fought, but bodies of women who seek counseling and abortion are besieged, guarded by uniformed escorts, protected, and attacked. Perhaps somewhat more metaphorically, however, women's bodies are sites of ideological battle--a battle with far-reaching material consequences. In order to explore connections between ideological and material, I will revisit debates over Republic of Ireland's constitutional amendment in early 1980s, infamous X Case of 1992 and concurrent Maastricht Treaty debates, subsequent amendments to Constitution, and recent and brief debates in Northern Ireland Assembly over extending Great Britain's 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. Because Nation relies on women for perpetuation of its population, I argue in this essay that there is a more than coincidental similarity between rhetorical construction of Ireland and rhetorical construction of fetus; this similarity points to necessary but often discursively obscured link between private choices of women and public interests of Irish Nation/State. (3) The abortion debates in Republic of Ireland reached their peak in early 1980s, in period leading up to 1983 abortion referendum. At stake at time was not only women's agency over their bodies, but also permeability of borders between Ireland (4) and rest of Europe, as Laury Oaks has noted. (5) According to an article in Magill, anti-abortion (6) forces, represented by Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC), were concerned with the trends in sexual permissiveness, decline in ethical values and high abortion rates that have developed in other countries. The PLAC groups were joined by a number of organizations, mostly Catholic, that saw abortion issue as the last line of defense against encroaching moral decadence of Europe (7)--a position that bears a striking similarity to reactions against homosexuality from nationalists earlier in century and from pro-family group Family Solidarity in 1992. (8) The anti-abortion amendment, it is worth pointing out, would be legally redundant: unchallenged 1861 Offenses Against Person Act, Sections 58 and 59, makes intentional miscarriage a felony act liable to a sentence of penal servitude, and makes anyone assisting such an act guilty of a misdemeanor. (9) The amendment was thus intended not to criminalize abortion but to protect life of unborn, in language of PLAC, from threat of forces ostensibly outside Ireland. …