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.
Table of Content
1. Introduction.- 2. A history of the Irish abortion debate.- 3. First-person abortion story-sharing as key pro-choice strategy.- 4. Repealing the Eighth and pro-choice Irish women’s abortion testimonies.- 5. Conclusion
About the author
David Ralph is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of
Work, Family and Commuting in Europe (Palgrave, 2015).
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