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Download Download NILQ 71(3): OA7–OA33 Abortion activism, legal change, and taking feminist law work seriously MÁIRÉAD ENRIGHT KATHRYN MCNEILLY FIONA DE LONDRAS * Abstract Abortion laws in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have recently undergone radical reform. This occurred following a 2018 referendum in the Republic and the passing of the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019 in Northern Ireland. In both jurisdictions, these legal changes are the products not only of moments of constitutional and legislative action or of litigation, but of decades of feminist protest and strategising that both generated and exploited moments of legal opportunity. In this article, drawing on a 2018 workshop and qualitative interviews with feminist activists, we focus attention on what we call the ‘feminist law work’ involved in reform, highlighting the role of non-lawyer activists in achieving legal change in instrumental, creative, emotional, and laborious ways. We argue that ‘feminist law work’ should be taken seriously as a highly skilled and indispensable driving force in formal legal change processes. Keywords: abortion; activism; law reform; legal change; feminist law work; feminist legal studies; Ireland; Northern Ireland Interviewer: If I had to ask you, right now, what’s going on – what are you doing to change the law [on abortion], what would your answer be? Kellie O’Dowd (activist, Alliance for Choice): What are we not doing? ver the last two years, the law on access to abortion has changed substantially in both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, the 8th Amendment Oto the Constitution was repealed and replaced with a constitutional provision permitting the Oireachtas to regulate the termination of pregnancy, which was achieved with the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018. In Northern Ireland, abortion was * Reader in Feminist Legal Studies, Birmingham Law School; Senior Lecturer, Queen’s University of Belfast School of Law; Professor of Global Legal Studies, Birmingham Law School. This research was supported by research activity grants from Birmingham Law School and Ulster University School of Law, a research activity grant from the SLSA to support interview transcription (Enright), and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (de Londras, PLP-2017-181). We are grateful to Dr Catherine O’Rourke of the Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster, for co-organising the workshop and securing funding to support it, as well as for her discussions on the animating ideas of the paper. Our thanks also to all of our interviewees, and to everyone who attended the workshop, for their time and their feminist law work. NILQ autumn 2020 OA8 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 71(3) decriminalised in 2019, 1 and is now legally available pursuant to new regulations introduced in 2020. 2 In both cases, the changes were brought about by particular legal ‘events’ – constitutional referendum, legislative change, the passage of regulations – but those events were preceded by decades of feminist activism and agitation, 3 including substantial amounts of what we term ‘feminist law work’. 4 This is work that takes place alongside, and sometimes against, more formalised law work and activity undertaken by voluntary and non-governmental organisations. It is apposite, now, to reflect on the dynamics of legal change in abortion law reform in Ireland and, particularly, to attend to and recognise the role that feminist law work has played in bringing that change about. As explained further below, the term ‘feminist law work’ is intended to capture the manifold ways in which non-lawyer feminist activists engage with law, legal mobilisation, legal consciousness, legal institutions and legal argumentation in order to try to achieve their desired end of safe, legal, and local abortion for pregnant people who seek it. Our aim in this paper is not to provide a comprehensive account of the decades of feminist law work that was undertaken in Ireland or, indeed, to suggest that formal legal changes have brought that feminist law work to an end. Instead, using structured conversations with eight invited abortion rights activists from Ireland and Northern Ireland as our jumping-off point, we seek to contribute to the complex retelling of the stories of abortion law reform in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The paper proceeds in five main parts. First, we outline our ethical and methodological approach (Part 1), before briefly describing the prevailing legal and political context in which the feminist law work that our participants discuss took place (Part 2). We then look in some detail at three different elements of feminist law work that emerged especially clearly in our engagement with activists and which shaped our understanding of the phenomenon: ambivalence about law (Part 3), the multifaceted nature of feminist law work (Part 4), and feminist law work’s ‘everydayness’ (Part 5). 1 Our ethical and methodological approach In this article we investigate the feminist law work undertaken by eight non-lawyer activists whom we invited to a workshop held in Ulster University, Belfast, on 23 November 2018. The participants were engaged in different ways in abortion rights activism, with three working primarily in the Republic of Ireland and five in Northern Ireland. Our workshop took place at a crucial turning point: Irish abortion law had been liberalised and there was a strong sense (as the slogan went at the time) that ‘the North is Next’. 5 Northern Irish feminist activists were at this point concentrating their attention on lobbying for abortion law reform at Westminster. Before the workshop, and in preparation for the discussion to be held there, Enright interviewed a number of the participants. These pre-workshop interviews helped us to shape the workshop discussion, which was oriented towards identifying how the activists to whom we spoke thought 1 Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019. 2 Abortion (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2020. 3 Fiona Bloomer, ‘Protests, parades and marches: activism and extending abortion legislation to Northern Ireland’ in Lisa Fitzpatrick (ed), Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland (Carysfort Press 2013) 245–266; Ruth Fletcher, ‘Silences: Irish women and abortion’ (1995) 50(1) Feminist Review 44. 4 See e.g. Sally Sheldon, Jane O’Neill, Clare Parker and Gayle Davis, ‘“Too much, too indigestible, too fast?” The decades of struggle for abortion law reform in Northern Ireland’ (2020) 83(4) Modern Law Review 761. 5 Melissa Davey, “‘North is next”: fresh fight for grassroots power that beat Ireland abortion ban’ The Guardian (London, 1 June 2018) <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/02/north-is-next-fresh- fight-for-grassroots-power-that-beat-ireland-abortion-ban>. Abortion activism, legal change, and taking feminist law work seriously OA9 about and enacted their relationship with law. The concept of feminist law work emerged from the workshop, rather than driving it. As we discussed what these women had spoken about, how they thought about law, and how they had trained themselves to challenge, manipulate, shape, undermine, ridicule and reform law as part of their activism, it became clear to us that what they had described was a vital form of legal labour rooted in feminist commitments and playing itself out in their everyday engagements with law, politics, reproduction, (il)legality, and activist strategising. Ethical approval for this qualitative research was granted by the University of Birmingham. All workshop participants and interviewees gave full informed consent to their participation in the research as well as use of the resulting data in published outputs. All participants reviewed a draft of this article prior to final publication. The participants in our workshop and interviews were women who have been active in struggles to reform abortion law in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and in the spaces between them. Ailbhe Smyth has been involved in feminist and reproductive rights activism for more than 40 years, is head of the Coalition to Repeal the 8th Amendment, and was one of the co-directors of Together for Yes, the official civil society platform for a ‘Yes’ vote in the May 2018 referendum. Linda Kavanagh is a long- time leader within the Abortion Rights Campaign and worked in social media for Together for Yes. Erin D’Arcy is an artist and founder of ‘In Her Shoes’; an intervention in the referendum campaign which curated women’s anonymous first-hand stories of being denied abortion care in Ireland. She published these stories on Facebook and, near the end of the campaign, in a hard copy form for distribution during canvassing. Of the Northern Ireland workshop participants, Sarah Ewart is a litigant who has undertaken legal action to challenge Northern Ireland’s abortion law. 6 Her mother Jane Christie, who also contributed to the conversation, accompanied her. Emma Campbell and Kellie O’Dowd were then co-directors of Alliance for Choice. Goretti Horgan is an activist with Alliance for Choice in Derry, work which she undertakes alongside her role as an academic at Ulster University working on abortion research. Our aim in bringing these eight interlocutors together was not to ‘tell the whole story’ of abortion law reform ‘North and South’; rather it was to begin a conversation on feminist activists as key actors in processes of legal change, complementing existing literature on ‘formal’ law reform in both jurisdictions. 7 We acknowledge that if eight different women had been in the room with us, or if the same eight women had been in the room with us six months earlier or later, the event could have been very different. We are conscious too that our participants did not include people working specifically to agitate for reproductive autonomy and freedom for women of colour, migrant women, women with disabilities, Traveller women, transpeople, and other specifically impacted persons who may seek abortion care.
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