"It's Most Peculiar That This Particular Story Doesn't Get Told": A Reproductive-Justice Analysis of Storytelling in the Repeal Campaign in Ireland, 2012–18

"It's Most Peculiar That This Particular Story Doesn't Get Told":A Reproductive-Justice Analysis of Storytelling in the Repeal Campaign in Ireland, 2012–18 Katie Mishler (bio) In 2018 years of feminist grassroots organizing and activism culminated in a referendum on the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland that the Irish public passed with sixty-six percent in favor of repeal. Repeal activism and the referendum result were galvanized by public outrage at the preventable death of Savita Halappanavar, an Indian-born woman living in Galway who died of septic shock after being denied a life-saving abortion while she was miscarrying. In the years since this tragic event spurred widespread activism in 2012, a number of high-profile writers, journalists, and academics have written openly about their experiences of abortion. Storytelling platforms such as In Her Shoes, The X-ile Project, The Repeal Project, and speak-outs organized by Abortion Rights Campaign and Together for Yes also emerged. Storytelling activism is rooted in the consciousness-raising efforts of second-wave feminism and was a prominent tool of social change in the Irish women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, linking personal experience to broader political inequalities (Connolly 40). Abortion storytelling serves as a powerful intervention into cultural and national narratives of gender, motherhood, and femininity, countering restrictive, essentialist ideologies with embodied experience. In recent years activists have used models of journalistic life-writing and social-media storytelling to create public spaces in which pregnant people can articulate their personal experiences of sexuality, End Page 80 reproductive health, and abortion. Previously, such stories remained taboo and thus remarkably absent from national discourse. In a personal history contributed to the Guardian Siobhán Donohue, a general practitioner and chairperson of the campaign group Terminations for Medical Reasons, tells her story of flying to Liverpool for an abortion after her twenty-week scan revealed a fatal fetal abnormality. Donohue deliberately evokes Ireland's literary tradition in discussing her case: "In this country, which would see itself as a nation of storytellers, … it's most peculiar that this particular story doesn't get told." Her message is two-fold: terminating a wanted pregnancy is a painful, difficult experience that, like a crisis pregnancy, no one would actively seek; however, it is also a reality that has been notably absent from Ireland's storytelling tradition that has played an active role in national-identity formation. And yet stories like Donohue's have the potential to shape public policy; according to the exit poll conducted by the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ, forty-three percent of voters stated that personal stories in the media had influenced their vote in the referendum. However, the experiences of migrant voices and other vulnerable, socially marginalized groups have been largely absent from the collective narrative that has evolved from mainstream storytelling activism. Although the Eighth Amendment criminalized abortion in Ireland, it was structural inequalities of race, class, nationality, and visa status that determined the ability of women and pregnant people to travel for medical care outside of the state.1 Savita, a migrant woman of color, became the face of the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment, yet the abortion stories featured in outlets with a popular readership such as the Irish Times between 2012 and 2018 were from an almost exclusively middle-class, white, and settled Irish perspective. This tendency led to a failure to create a comprehensive narrative of the inequalities and power imbalances in Ireland that is required to achieve reproductive justice for all. Grassroots, digital, and social-media End Page 81 projects have democratized abortion storytelling globally, but linguistic, cultural, and technological barriers preclude the participation of the most politically disenfranchised. An intersectional framework of reproductive justice that moves beyond a pro-choice/pro-life binary and instead frames reproductive rights in social-justice terms demonstrates how abortion storytelling can articulate diverse identities and reorient the reproductive-rights movement to address social inequality. In this article I will employ this framework primarily by building on the work of activist and academic Loretta J. Ross in order to analyze abortion storytelling in both the popular press and grassroots platforms. The purpose...