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COPYRIGHT 2001 Irish American Cultural Institute
Unionists must ensure that nationalists don't outnumber them. On the 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 the 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 the limits of power, mobility, and the 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 the 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 the street, parking lot, and/or the clinic the ground on which the battle is fought, but the bodies of the women who seek counseling and abortion are besieged, guarded by uniformed escorts, protected, and attacked. Perhaps somewhat more metaphorically, however, women's bodies are the sites of ideological battle--a battle with far-reaching material consequences.
In order to explore the connections between the ideological and the material, I will revisit the debates over the Republic of Ireland's constitutional amendment in the early 1980s, the infamous "X" Case of 1992 and concurrent Maastricht Treaty debates, the subsequent amendments to the Constitution, and the recent and brief debates in the Northern Ireland Assembly over extending Great Britain's 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. Because the Nation relies on women for the perpetuation of its population, I argue in this essay that there is a more than coincidental similarity between the rhetorical construction of Ireland and the rhetorical construction of the fetus; this similarity points to the necessary but often discursively obscured link between the "private" choices of women and the "public" interests of the Irish Nation/State. (3)
The abortion debates in the Republic of Ireland reached their peak in the early 1980s, in the period leading up to the 1983 abortion referendum. At stake at the time was not only women's agency over their bodies, but also the permeability of the borders between Ireland (4) and the rest of Europe, as Laury Oaks has noted. (5) According to an article in Magill, the anti-abortion (6) forces, represented by the 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 the abortion issue as "the last line of defense against the encroaching moral decadence of Europe" (7)--a position that bears a striking similarity to reactions against homosexuality from nationalists earlier in the century and from the "pro-family" group Family Solidarity in 1992. (8) The anti-abortion amendment, it is worth pointing out, would be legally redundant: the unchallenged 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act, Sections 58 and 59, makes intentional miscarriage a felony act liable to a life 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 the unborn," in the language of PLAC, from the threat of forces ostensibly outside Ireland. Both pro-choice and queer politics suggested a threat to morality, morality defined primarily through the Catholic Church but also, given the extent to which Europe is here figured as the threat, defined as a particularly Irish kind of morality. As Oaks writes, "in Ireland, reproduction is a medium through which competing national origin stories that focus on Irish national identity and cultural self-determination, indeed visions of `Irishness' itself, are imagined and expressed" (Oaks, "Irishness," 133). Both the anti-abortion and the anti-homosexual positions imply a desire for the reproduction of a particular kind of Irishness, one that contains Irishness in a tightly circumscribed heterosexual family narrative.
"Reproduction" is a key term here, for what are, I would argue, more than metaphorical reasons. The concern over "encroaching moral decadence" masked a concern about Ireland's seeming inability to keep its population intact and within its borders. As Oaks notes, population loss during the 1845-48 potato blight and mass emigration in the 1980s and early 1990s fueled the fear that the Irish nation was in jeopardy, at risk of "dying out." Long influenced by the Catholic Church's strictures against contraception and abortion, however, the government prior to this time had not needed legislation officially to prevent abortion. The link between Catholicism and the national interest has ensured that the Catholic Church has a central role in the Irish State, despite the 1972 repeal of Article 44, section 2, of the 1937 Irish Constitution, Bunreacht na hEireann, in which "The State recognizes the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of its citizens." (10) The relationship between reproduction and the State is also reflected in an earlier section of the Constitution: Bunreacht na hEireann officially insists that the woman's place is in the home and that women bear the responsibility of the family. Although this fact has been much commented upon, it bears repeating. Under the section of "Fundamental Rights" entitled "The Family" (Article 41), the Constitution states the following:
1. 1 [degree] The State recognizes the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law. 2 [degrees] The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.
2. 1 [degrees] In particular, the State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. 2 [degrees] The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home. (11)
Ruth Riddick has pointed out that "woman" and "mother" are seen as interchangeable terms in the Irish Constitution, (12) as can be seen from the rhetorical move from 2.1 to 2.2: at least, it is clear that mothers are the only women the State deems worth acknowledging. The combination of the pro-natalist Church and the domestic patriarchy insisted on by the Constitution ensure that the concerns of reproducing the Irish national subject rest firmly on the shoulders of Irish women. The debates about abortion have thus never focused on population control, despite the clear nationalist interest in maintaining an Irish population. Instead, the nationalist concern has been framed in terms of the morality--or, more to the point, the immorality--of the individual reproductive choices of Irish women. Those "choices" are clearly circumscribed by the State and are clearly more than just "personal," private choices, however, given the State's investment in maintaining a specifically Irish population. As American feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon has argued, the language of "choice" used by pro-choice groups in the US does assume that women have agency within the private sphere--a dangerous naivete, she argues, since "privacy is by no means a gender-neutral concept." (13)
The way in which the Irish anti-abortion forces have chosen to speak about abortion is similar to that of American anti-abortion/pro-life discourse. What is usually masked, in both campaigns, is the relationship between the anti-abortion interests...
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