A woman died: Abortion and the politics of birth in Ireland
Ronit Lentin
Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin
rlentin@tcd.ie
2955 words
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A woman died: Abortion and the politics of birth in Ireland
Abstract
The death in hospital of 17 weeks pregnant Indian dentist Savita Halappanavar in October
2012, rekindled Ireland’s long standing abortion debate. Locating her case in the politics of
birth in Ireland, this article suggests that abortion is central to the construction of
contemporary Irish identities. It locates Halappanavar’s story both within Ireland’s gendered
politics, where women are cast as m/others, and within the briefer history of casting migrant
women’s birthing practices as threatening the integrity of Irish citizenship. The article further
claims that migrant m/others are the female version of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’, or
homo sacer – femina sacra – she whose life can be taken by the sovereign racial state.
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A woman died: Abortion and the politics of birth in Ireland
Introduction: A woman died
On November 14 2012 the Irish Times reported the death of septicaemia and E.coli on 28
October in University Hospital Galway of 17 weeks pregnant Indian dentist Savita
Halappanavar. Her husband Praveen says they asked repeatedly for a termination after her
amniotic fluids had broken but were denied because the foetal heartbeat was still present
and because, they were told Ireland is ‘a Catholic country’. Her death rekindled Ireland’s
ongoing abortion saga, even though this was not abortion. Halappanavar was miscarrying
and her foetus had no chance of surviving. Because the neck of the womb was open, there
was an opportunity for bugs to travel into the womb, spreading infection and causing shock
and multi-organ failure, leading to her death (Houston, 2012).
Savita Halappanavar’s death deeply shocked Irish society. My argument is that
beyond being a woman who unnecessarily died in childbirth in Ireland’s post-Catholic
patriarchy, Halappanavar was a migrant woman, whose death requires theorising the
Republic of Ireland as a gendered racial state (Goldberg, 2002). Her death led, on the one
hand, to renewed demands for the long promised legislation regarding the equal weight of
the lives of the unborn and the mother, as voted for in a 1983 constitutional referendum; on
the other it strengthened Ireland’s ‘pro life’ movement’s resolve to oppose any legislation for
abortion.
Interrogating the politics of birth in Ireland, this article argues that abortion is central
to the construction of contemporary Irish identities. I locate Halappanavar’s case within the
broader narrative of women’s reproductive functions in Ireland, and within the recent history
of casting migrant women’s birthing practices as threatening the ‘integrity of Irish citizenship’.
Halappanavar’s mistreatment, ruled by the coroner a ‘medical midadventure’, and described
by her husband as ‘horrendous, barbaric and inhumane’ (Cullen and Holland, 2013), is but
the latest episode in Ireland’s (bio)politics of birth. Ireland’s history of the maltreatment of
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labouring women is lengthy. Apart from several women whose babies have died as result of
Ireland’s illiberal abortion laws (Holland, 2012), the Irish government is only now considering
compensating 200 survivors of the 1,500 women who in the 1960s underwent
symphysiotomy (sawing a labouring woman’s pubic bone in half to open the birth canal that
left the majority permanently injured, with incontinence and difficulties walking) (Griffin,
2013). Between 1974 and 1998, obstetrician Michael Neary performed an inordinate number
(129) of caesarean hysterectomies in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. In 2013
some of Neary’s victims had still not been included in a government compensation scheme
(O’Regan, 2013). And in 2010, another pregnant migrant woman, Bimbo Onanuga, died of
cardiac arrest after being induced – using the ulcer medication misoprostol, about which
there had been licensing issues – following the death of her baby in the womb in Dublin’s
Rotunda hospital (Naughton, 2013).
Historically, Ireland’s biopolitics of birth involved incarcerating thousands of ‘fallen
women’ in Magdalene laundries run by religious orders between 1922 and 1996 with the full
knowledge of the state in what Ireland’s premier called in his public apology ‘a cruel and
pitiless Ireland’ (Irish Times, 2013). More recently, responding to moral panic about migrant
women ‘childbearing against the state’ (Luibhéid, 2004), the 2004 Citizenship Referendum
deprived migrant children of jus soli citizenship entitlement, and migrant m/others of
residency. The unspoken intention was and still is banishing the other from the remits of Irish
citizenship, maintaining Ireland’s racial homogeneity.
After briefly outlining the ramifications of what became known as the ‘X case’, the
article argues that the birthing and reproductive functions of women in Ireland have always
been policed, controlled and abused, and that the racial state is also a ‘state of exception’
(Agamben, 2005), where some populations are cast as what Agamben calls ‘bare life’ or
‘homo sacer’, at the mercy of sovereign power.
Abortion in Ireland: The X case and its ramifications
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Abortion had been illegal in Ireland since the British 1861 Offences against the Person Act
which criminalises women and anyone who assists women to ‘procure a miscarriage’. This
law remains on the Irish Statute books (Irish Family Planning Association [IFPA]). 1 In 1983,
the anti-abortion ‘pro life’ camp initiated a constitutional referendum to tighten Ireland’s anti
abortion legislation. The initiative backfired: after a bitterly contested campaign, 54 per cent
of the electorate voted in favour of inserting into the Constitution Article 40.3.3 that
guaranteed the equal right to life of the unborn and the mother.
By discursively controlling women’s reproduction by referring to ‘women’ as ‘mothers’
and ‘foetuses’ as ‘babies’ (Smyth, 1992a: 8), this amendment inadvertently facilitated the
1992 ‘x case’, when a 14 years old girl, raped by a neighbour, was prevented from leaving
Ireland to obtain an abortion in Britain. The girl’s parents sought permission to travel to
Britain, but the Garda Siochána (Irish police) referred the case to the High Court which
issued an injunction against the travel, later reversed by the Supreme Court, which ruled that
as ‘X’ was reported as suicidal and as her life was in danger, she was entitled to an abortion
in Ireland. It is understood, however, that Ms X went to Britain where her pregnancy was
terminated (Smyth, 1992a: 7). Ailbhe Smyth writes about the X case: ‘Women in Ireland are
living in a police state... the reproductive activities of women in Ireland are being subjected to
a process of “regulation, discipline and control” carried out by the police in accordance with
state policy and laws’ (1992b: 138). The fierce debates following to the X case led to another
constitutional referendum in 1992, with voters passing the freedom to travel outside the state
for abortion and the freedom to obtain information on abortion services outside the state.
Abortion has always been a central issue in defining Irishness. Voting in June 1992
by referendum to ratify the EU Maastricht Treaty, the people of Ireland only did so due to the
assurance of Protocol 17, inserted by the Irish government, which provided against abortion;
and in 2002 Irish voters rejected another attempt by the Pro Life camp to outlaw abortion.
Irish women, however, continue to seek abortions abroad: according to the British
Department of Health statistics, between 1980 and 2011 at least 152,061 women living in
Ireland travelled to Britain to access safe abortions; this is probably an underestimation as
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some women would not give their Irish addresses. The numbers, which peaked in 2001
(6,673, including 12 under 15s), are gradually coming down: in 2011, 4,149 Irish women
(including 37 under 16s) sought abortions in the UK; and between 2005 and 2009, 1,470
women from Ireland sought abortions in the Netherlands. 2
Had the Irish government legislated after the X case, Savita Halappanavar might not
have died. It was her death, as much as pressure from Europe, that brought home to the
Irish government the urgency of legislating for abortion in Ireland, 21 years after the X case.
In December 2012, after a strong reprimand by the Council of Europe, the Government
announced plans to introduce legislation to finally make abortion legal in certain
circumstances, due for legislation in spring 2013. Abortion, like other ‘unspeakable’ aspects
of female sexuality and sexual behaviour (Smyth, 1992b: 143-4), is no longer a ‘taboo topic’.
Yet, as Smyth argued in 1992, the question of ‘reproductive freedom’ for women in Ireland
remains problematic in a society where only m/others are ‘real women’.
I further argue that the fact that Halappanavar was a migrant woman planning to give
birth in a country that only eight years previously legislated against migrant children’s access
to citizenship, gives this case an additional twist, to which I now turn.
A migrant died
Ireland has a long history of pitching ‘good (Catholic, married) mothers’ versus ‘bad
(unmarried) mothers’ (Meaney, 2005). However, Savita Halappanavar died not merely as a
woman whose reproductive practices are controlled by Irish patriarchy, but as a migrant
woman, whose body is othered, as emerged from the debates around the Citizenship
Referendum which made gendered (black) bodies central to the re-articulation of Irishness as
white supremacy (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006: 98). Since mothering carries a property of
otherness, I frame migrant women as m/others, denoting their otherness (Lentin, 2004).
In the 1990s, Ireland, previously marked by emigration, became an immigration
destination; in an attempt to control immigration, the state targeted migrant m/others. Since
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the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, all people born on the island of Ireland
were granted automatic jus soli citizenship, enshrined by the 1937 Constitution and the
1956/1986 Nationality and Citizenship acts. Prior to 2004 a series of Supreme Court cases
granted, and then denied migrant parents of Irish citizen children the right of residence to
give ‘care and company’ to their citizen child. Anxious about migrant m/others birthing
children in Ireland, the Minister for Justice removed the process whereby migrant parents
could apply to remain on the grounds of having a citizen child in 2003. This resulted in some
11,500 migrant parents becoming candidates for deportation. Despite robust lobbying,
deportations went ahead, including at least 20 citizen children (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006:
53).
Unsurprisingly, the government’s argument centred on migrant and asylum seeker
m/others seen as subverting the integrity of Ireland’s immigration, asylum and citizenship
regimes. A Department of Justice briefing document described migrant m/others arriving in
Ireland in large numbers to give birth solely to secure Irish citizenship for their children,
leading to migrant m/others being scapegoated (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006: 103). In 2004
the Citizenship Referendum was endorsed by 78.9 per cent of Irish voters who voted in
favour of jus sanguinis citizenship, granting citizenship only to children one of whose parents
is a citizen.
Conclusion: Femina sacra in Ireland’s racial state
Goldberg (2002) argues that all modern nation states are racial states aiming above all to
construct homogeneity. The racial state is also, as Agamben (2005) argues, a ‘state of
exception’ in which the sovereign reduces some population categories to ‘bare life’ (homo
sacer) whose destiny is legally determined by sovereign power, which puts itself above the
law (Agamben, 1995: 10). The racial state uses every possible governmental technology,
including constitutions, border controls and population censuses, and the education and
welfare systems to construct national homogeneity and categorise the population, often
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suspending the law and reducing unwanted categories of people to ‘bare life’. For Agamben,
homo sacer is the ideal-type excluded being, whose life is devoid of value; therefore killing or
deporting a homo sacer is not a punishable offence as his/her life is deemed to be outside
the remit of the nation.
As Agamben hardly dwells on the gendered meanings of homo sacer, and as the
racial state is also gendered, I conclude by engendering Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’ category
and the link he makes between birth and nation, deriving from nascere — to be born (1995:
128).
Indeed, in Ireland the link between birth and nation is palpably obvious in the long
history of positioning Irish women as the carriers of the nation’s honour and ‘common good’.
Thus, article 41.2.1 of the Constitution of Ireland declares that ‘the State recognises that by
her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common
good cannot be achieved’. Thus too, generations of women considered sexually deviant
were incarcerated in Magdalene Laundries run by religious orders, where they performed
slave labour, often for years. This was part of a culture of incarceration: Ireland locked up
one in 100 of its citizens in Magdalene laundries, industrial schools, mental hospitals and
‘mother and baby’ homes, where women pregnant out of wedlock were locked up and forced
to give their babies for adoption (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2012). As O’Toole (2013)
argues, the confinement of Ireland’s ‘flighty’ daughters benefitted families and society, and
created very deep habits of collusion, evasion and adaptation, which is probably why Irish
people did not question the targeting of migrant m/others and voted in large numbers for
changing Ireland’s citizenship laws.
The body of woman creates and contains birth-nations, which is why nation states
are moved to strictly control female sexuality, and why in Ireland ‘womanhood and
motherhood are represented as synonymous realities’ (Smyth, 1992: 143). However,
globalisation, immigration and the sudden presence of non-ethnic Irish citizens changed the
relationship between the state and its m/others. Targeting sexually active Irish women was
the preamble to banning and controlling migrant m/others as the producers of future
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generations of the racially ‘inferior’, leading me to posit migrant m/others as the female
version of homo sacer – femina sacra.
The official report on Halappavar’s death found that there was ‘an overemphasis by
hospital staff on her unviable foetus and an underemphasis on her deteriorating health’
(Holland, 2013). My final argument is that Savita Halappanavar’s health and life were
sacrificed to her foetus’s heartbeat and she was thus femina sacra, she who was ‘made die’
in order to ‘make live’ her unborn foetus (see Foucault, 2003), her life sacrificed at the altar
of Ireland’s church-inspired strict abortion laws, which, despite the 1983 referendum and the
1992 Supreme Court ruling, still tacitly privilege the life of the unborn over the life of the
m/other.
Savita Halappanavar did not decide to have a baby in Ireland in order to subvert the
integrity of Irish citizenship – after the 2004 referendum this option was no longer open to
her. However, her death, which might be seen as enabling the life of those considered ‘truly
Irish’ (or Catholic, in this case), tipped the balance of Ireland’s anti abortion regime,
inadvertently leading to the government having to table the long awaited legislation on
abortion.
The case also represents the complex ways in which processes of globalisation and
migration, leading to structural racial and gender inequalities, create conditions for
understanding Ireland as the racial state that it is, where Irish anxieties about m/others who
disrupt national (and Catholic) certainties are still, as Smyth said already in 1992, being
‘regulated, disciplined and controlled’.
References
Agamben, G. (1995) Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, Ca: Stanford
University Press.
Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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Culllen, P. And K. Holland (2013) ‘”Horrendous, barbaric, inhumane”, Savita’s husband gives
his verdict’, the Irish Times, 20 April.
Foucault, M. (2003) Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-76.
London: Allen Lane.
Goldberg, D. T. (2002) The Racial State. Oxford: Blackwell.
Griffin, D. (2013) ‘Symphysiotomy group urges Government to support redress Bill’, the Irish
Times, 9 April.
Holland, K. (2012) ‘Reasons for women not to be cheerful’, the Irish Times, 29 December.
Holland, K. (2013) ‘Savita death report finds foetus, not mother, was main focus’, the Irish
Times, 2 April.
Houston, M. (2012) ‘Death as a result of infection during miscarriage rare’, the Irish Times,
14 November.
Irish Family Planning Association. (n.d) ‘Abortion in Ireland: A Legal Timeline’,
http://www.ifpa.ie/Hot-Topics/Abortion/Abortion-in-Ireland-Timeline accessed 20
February 2013.
Irish Times. (2013) ‘A cruel and pitiless Ireland’, editorial, the Irish Times, 20 February.
Lentin, R. and R. McVeigh (2006) After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation,
Dublin: Metro Eireann Publications.
Lentin, R. (2004) ‘Strangers and strollers: Feminist notes on researching migrant m/others’,
Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 27, no. 4: 301-14.
Luibhéid, E. (2004) ‘Childbearing against the state? Asylum seeker women in the Irish
Republic’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 27, no. 4: 335-50.
Meaney, G. (2005) ‘Migrant bodies: Maternity and the construction of white identities in
Ireland’, Paper presented at the ‘Double vision: Liminal Irish identities’ conference,
University College Dublin, 18-10 March.
Naughton, G. (2013) ‘Woman suffered fatal cardiac arrest after induced labour, inquest told’,
the Irish Times, 19 April.
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O’Regan, E. (2013) ‘Former victims of Michael Neary accuse health minister of breaking
compensation promise’, the Irish Independent, 21 March.
O’Sullivan, E. and I. O’Donnell (eds.) (2012) Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients,
Prisoners and Penitents. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
O’Toole, F. (2013) ‘Repression shaped our passive society’, the Irish Times, 26 February.
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Papers, Ireland, Dublin: Attic Press.
Ronit Lentin is associate professor of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. She has published
extensively on race and gender, racism in Ireland, Israel/Palestine. Her books include
Racism and Antiracism in Ireland (2002, with Robbie McVeigh), Women and the Politics of
Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (2002, with
Nahla Abdo), After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (2006, with Robbie
McVeigh), Race and State (2006/8, with Alana Lentin), Thinking Palestine (2008), CoMemory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (2010) and Migrant
Activism and Integration from Below in Ireland (2012, with Elena Moreo).
Notes:
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Based on the Irish Family Planning Association’s ‘Abortion in Ireland: A Legal Timeline’,
http://www.ifpa.ie/Hot-Topics/Abortion/Abortion-in-Ireland-Timeline, accessed 18 February 2013.
2
Irish Family Planning Association http://www.ifpa.ie/Hot-Topics/Abortion/Statistics, accessed 20
February 2013.
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