‘Our Darkest Hour’: Women and Structural Violence under Ireland’s 8th Amendment

Cara Delay,Michaela Carroll,Beth Sundstrom,Annie Gjelsvik

doi:10.20897/femenc/11756

Abstract

This article analyses women’s stories of violence in the context of the 8th Amendment. Our analysis of 773 anonymous women’s narratives from In Her Shoes reveals instances of rape and partner violence, health disparities, forced travel, barriers to care, and withholding of information by healthcare providers. Posts described the impact of structural violence on women’s medical care and lived realities. While scholars have produced essential analyses of structural violence in twentieth-century Ireland, assessing how harm has impacted women and children in particular, most works focus exclusively on the institutions run by the state and Catholic Church: schools, asylums, laundries, and homes for unmarried mothers. Here, we argue for the expansion of the concept of structural violence, demonstrating that it also affected women and children who were not institutionalised. Anti-abortion policies, we contend, are part and parcel of gendered structural violence. In Ireland, the 8th Amendment enacted interconnected forms of violence on many of Ireland’s women and, in some cases, girls. Despite the violence these women faced, their voicing of their experiences served as resistance, demonstrating how support and storytelling, in some instances, can help start the process of healing the individual and collective wounds of the past.

Highlights

In early 2021, the Irish Republic published its long-awaited report on the country’s mother-and-baby homes, titled Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (2021)
Except in cases of imminent threat to the life of the pregnant person, abortion remained illegal in the Republic of Ireland until 2018 when, by popular referendum, citizens voted overwhelmingly to clear a pathway for legal abortion
We identified structural violence as a dominant theme in In Her Shoes narratives, and we categorised the forms of violence that contributors discussed into dominant subthemes: obstetric violence, interpersonal violence, and emotional violence

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In early 2021, the Irish Republic published its long-awaited report on the country’s mother-and-baby homes, titled Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (2021). Compelling providers to deliberately withhold information about reproductive options is further evidence that the state inflicted violent harm on women’s reproductive bodies (Berer, 2013; Bloomer, 2014; Broussard, 2020; Drążkiewicz et al, 2020; Enright and Ring, 2020; McReynolds-Pérez, 2017) Ensuring that only those with the financial means were able to access abortion care both in the comfort and privacy of their own homes through abortion pills or in a clinic setting outside of Ireland was a discriminatory practice that oppressed marginalised women experiencing physically, emotionally, and economically challenging pregnancies Obstetric violence under the 8th Amendment had significant real-world effects, resulting in deaths, illness, and other poor healthcare outcomes for pregnant people Essential to this violence was the patriarchal and pronatalist ideology that underpinned Irish culture: one that constructed unmarried pregnant women as pariahs, forcing some to emigrate, a culture that contained and controlled so-called sexual ‘deviants’, and declared that married women’s lives were only as important, and sometimes less important, than their foetuses. Functioning alongside, and intersecting with, these institutional forms of violence were instances of interpersonal violence that further demonstrated the misogynistic nature of Irish culture

INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE

EMOTIONAL VIOLENCE

CONCLUSION