This activity should take you about 20 minutes to complete.
In this activity, we’ll exploration the Irish abortion campaigns, north and south. We’ll look at intersectionality in action and explore some of the factors that limit our capacity to act in an intersectional way through an
The following audio clips are taken from a podcast with Fiona de Londras, a Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham and Naomi Connor, Co-convenor of Alliance for Choice. In the first clip, Fiona talks about the history of the campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment in the South of Ireland. As you listen to the podcast, think about the following question:
What aspects of intersectionality does Fiona talk about in her account of the Repeal the 8th Campaign?
“The vision was based around intersectionality”
Fiona stresses two aspects of intersectionality. The first is that those involved in the campaign had an understanding of abortion and abortion access as being bound up with intersecting inequalities, identities and groups. So access to abortion was, and is, influenced by social class and income, race and your immigration status, disability etc. So there was a clear understanding that winning the battle to legalise abortion had to mean securing access to abortion for everyone including people of different social backgrounds, ethnicities and those with disabilities etc. The second aspect she emphasises is one of solidarity across and between different organisations and groups (trades unions movements, children’s rights movements etc) and how common experience of mutual aid (coming together to support people travelling for abortions) meant that people had the lived experience of how intersecting marginalisation influenced access to abortion.
Now listen to the next clip, where Fiona talks about what happened once the campaign got underway. As you listen, think about the following question:
What factors caused the Campaign to Repeal the 8th to lose sight of its intersectional focus?
“But then the law and politics got in the way”
Fiona says that the legal need for a referendum meant that the Repeal the 8th Campaign now had to convince the entire population of Ireland to support the right to choose. The ’overriding priority was to win the referendum’. This led to a focus on the ’middle ground’. In other words, the campaign had to focus on issues that Irish people would have most sympathy with (for example, serious fetal anomoly). So, as Fiona says ‘almost inevitably, marginalised people fall away, complexity falls away’.
The experience of the Repeal the 8th Campaign highlights two tensions around working in an intersectional way.
First an intersectional approach always emphasises how people are complexly marginalised and the relationships between overarching inequalities such as those around race, class etc and the issue at hand (such as abortion). This complexity is not easy to translate into easy and compelling slogans and messages that are often part and parcel of political campaigning.
Second an intersectional approach tries not only to secure abortion access, but also tries to counter the overarching factors that limit people’s access to abortion such as sexism and misogyny, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, homo, and trans phobia etc. As we will see in Activity 5, many people, and governments, are very attached to sexism and misogyny, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, homo, and trans phobia!
Now listen to the next clip, where Fiona reflects on the abortion law and provision in Ireland. As you listen, consider the following question:
What are the limits of an abortion law that is not intersectional?
“The response from the Government was ‘no this is what the people voted for. You can’t go mucking about with it now!’”
Fiona talks at length about the ways in which the new abortion law continues to discriminate against people who are, for example, asylum seekers, poorer, without private transport, trans, disabled or in abusive or coercive relationships. Although she says, rightly, that the situation in Ireland is ‘immeasurably better’ than it was before the law was passed. She is realistic about the limitations of this non intersectional law, and the fact that the struggle to obtain an intersectional abortion law must continue.
Naomi Connor makes this point so well in the same podcast. She is also realistic about the application of the abortion law in the North of Ireland not being intersectional enough, but she also stresses that frequently it’s better to accept something imperfect as a staging point to something better.
Good enough for now?
“We sat down and we said ‘are we going to support this? Is this the right thing to do?'”
Now go to Lesson 5 : Marginalisation and Privilege