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UCC Library and UCC researchers have made this item openly available. Please let us know how this has helped you. Thanks! Title Discursive strategies of legitimization: The case of abortion in Ireland in 2018 Author(s) O'Donovan, Jennifer; Siller, Barbara Publication date 2021-06-11 Original citation O'Donovan, J. and Siller, B. (2021) 'Discursive strategies of legitimization: The case of abortion in Ireland in 2018', TEANGA: The Journal of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics, 12(12), pp. 1- 22. Available at: https://journal.iraal.ie/index.php/teanga/article/view/495 (Accessed: 9 August 2021) Type of publication Article (peer-reviewed) Link to publisher's https://journal.iraal.ie/index.php/teanga/article/view/495 version Access to the full text of the published version may require a subscription. Rights © 2021, TEANGA, The Journal of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/11699 from Downloaded on 2021-10-06T09:05:43Z 1 Discursive Strategies of Legitimization: The Case of Abortion in Ireland in 2018 Jennifer O’Donovan, University of Edinburgh; Barbara Siller, University College Cork Abstract The following article is based on a study on abortion discourse carried out in Ireland in 2018 prior to and after the referendum to Repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, allowing for legislation to be introduced regulating termination of pregnancy. The main focus of the study is to identify the strategies of legitimization employed by both online users and campaign bodies in the period directly before and after the historic referendum. The article also aims to examine how the discursive strategies engage in creating national identities as well as identities of the collective voter groups. The corpus includes unregulated textual and regulated visual data collected between May and June 2018. The textual data derive from the Facebook pages of four prominent campaigning bodies encompassing both sides of the referendum one month before and after the referendum, while the visual data include photos taken of the campaign posters displayed in Ireland. Critical Discourse Analysis forms the conceptual framework of the study. Analysis was undertaken by employing Reyes’ (2011) model of strategies of legitimization in political discourse as well as the two visual analysis frameworks proposed by van Leeuwen (2008) and Ledin and Machin (2018). A mixed-method approach in the format of a triangulation design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007) is used, whereby qualitative textual and visual discourses are transformed into quantitative data for the purpose of analysis. The findings indicate that the strategy of emotion is the most utilized one; this becomes apparent through the quantitatively high use of terms such as ‘rape’, ‘incest’ or ‘murder’, operationalised to provoke an emotional reaction in the reader. The results also point to high instances of ‘othering’ strategies employed by the different groups participating in the discourse. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis; abortion; identity; strategies of legitimization. 2 1. Introduction The Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, passed by referendum in 1983, equivalates the right to life of the foetus to the right to life of the mother, thereby outlawing abortion. The opportunity to introduce this clause arose after a period of government upheaval had paved the way for the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign to assure there would be no immediate possibility to legislate for legal abortions. There were three subsequent referenda in November 1992. The first sought to remove suicide as legal grounds for abortion after the ‘X Case’ (the X Case referred to the case of a 14-year- old girl, a victim of rape, who was refused the possibility to travel to England to procure an abortion) in which a Supreme Court ruling stated that a risk to a woman’s life could be a legitimate reason for a lawful termination of pregnancy. This referendum was not upheld. The Irish population was in favour of the following two referenda, the first being that the Eighth Amendment could not impede a woman’s right to travel to another country for an abortion, and the second being the right to access information about abortion. A further referendum in 2002 attempted to remove the risk of suicide as grounds for termination and this was, once again, defeated.1 With the 2018 referendum the people of Ireland could, for the first time, vote for or against the possibility to legislate for lawful abortion. This occurred in an age when social media was constantly gaining in popularity and influence thereby allowing people the possibility to express their opinions openly on a public forum. This has opened the door to debates, arguments and information-sharing. While this study draws on previous studies, in particular on Smyth’s (2005) studies on the media coverage of the ‘X Case’ in 1992 in Ireland, in contrast to them, it includes data from social media, namely Facebook. The study thus focuses on both official discourse by campaign bodies, and less regulated online discourse. In addition to the strategies of legitimization, the study also analyses how the identities of the voter groups are constructed through the creation of a clear-cut ‘Yes’ group, in favour of legalising abortion and a ‘No’ group, against the legalisation. These identities are established linguistically through the practice of ‘othering’ by 1 For a comprehensive account of the timeline of the referendum and the abortion politics in Ireland from the early 1980s to date, see Field (2018). While Field places the referendum in the context of the marriage equality referendum of 2015, he argues that this referendum “deserves its own place in history” (p. 608) highlighting its significance. An activist perspective is offered by Carnegie and Roth (2019), both members of the Abortion Rights Campaign ARC. Insights into the referendum outcome, drawing on theories of deliberative democracy, voting behaviour and generational change, are provided in the article by Elkink et al. (2020). 3 which a group constructs its own identity through the creation of an antithesis (Wodak, 2011, p. 62). 2. Theoretical Approach This study places itself in the field of Discourse Analysis, a method of inquiry that sees language as socially constructed and as embedded in a political and ideological communicative context. In his book Language and Power (1989), Fairclough highlights the following three aspects of language: a) Language is an integral part of society and is not a separate entity; b) Language is a “social process”; c) Language is a “socially conditioned process”, that is, determined by other extralinguistic elements of society (p. 22). He thus explicitly points to the fact that language is a social phenomenon and cannot be separated from any societal issue such as exclusionary processes, hierarchies and power. These characteristics, however, are not inherent to language, as Wodak and Meyer (2009) emphasise, when affirming that “power does not necessarily derive from language, but language can be used to challenge power, to subvert it, to alter distributions of power in the short and long term” (p. 10). According to Jäger (2001) discourse can be defined: ‘as the flow of knowledge - and/or all societal knowledge stored - throughout all time’..., which determines individual and collective doing and/or formative action that shapes society, thus exercising power. As such, discourses can be understood as material realities sui generis”. (p. 34) Beside the importance of the duration and the context within which discourses are situated, the determinative and formative aspects of discourses are also highlighted, given their relevance for this study. Moreover, a broad definition of discourse is suggested, which also indicates the inclusion of non-verbal discourses. Since this study investigates discourses which serve to “justify courses of actions” (Reyes, 2011, p. 781), it considers as productive the strategies of legitimization outlined by Reyes. The strategies employed to analyse the data are: legitimation through emotions, legitimation through a hypothetical future, legitimation through rationality, voices of expertise, and 4 altruism, whereby one further distinction is drawn between positive and negative voices of expertise as the data point towards this. Since the study also considers iconographic discourse, visual approaches as suggested by van Leeuwen, Ledin and Machin further inform the theoretical framework. 3. Methodology and Data Collection The study employs a mixed-method approach, transforming the qualitative textual and visual discourses into quantitative data for the purpose of analysis. This method draws on the ‘Triangulation Design: Data Transformation Model’ as outlined by Creswell and Plano Clark (2007, p. 65), whereby first, qualitative and quantitative data are collected and analysed. Subsequently, qualitative data are transformed into quantitative data in order to compare the two sets. Finally, the quantitative and the qualitative analysis is interpreted. The language employed by online users and the discourses which underpinned the issue of abortion in 2018 in Ireland in the lead up to and the period after the referendum form one part of the data corpus of this research. Both the language used in online comments and the discourses employed in the