Cara Delay & Beth Sundstrom
In May 2018, voters in the Republic of Ireland made a clear statement when they voted overwhelmingly to decriminalize abortion for the first time in the country’s history. This visible support for abortion rights marked a sea-change in popular views over just a few decades; the Irish public had voted for further restrictions on abortion in 1983 through the controversial Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which equated fetal life with the life of a pregnant person.
The Irish case is particularly relevant now, in the wake of the Dobbs decision (2022) in the United States, because it demonstrates how activists can create successful abortion-rights campaigns. Irish activists’ tactics leading up to the 2018 popular vote included story-telling and truth-telling via social media. Created by Erin Darcy, “In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth” (IHS), a social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter, was particularly effective. Started in the few months before the 2018 vote on abortion, IHS publicized Irish women’s raw and personal abortion experiences, garnering 66,000 followers in only a few months. Posts, which were anonymous, focused on Irish women’s travel to England in the previous decades to access abortion safely and legally.
By sharing their experiences on IHS, Irish women gave voice to common experiences that were historically cloaked in silence and shame. They discussed bodily realities, such as bleeding and pain. They described feeling like they were on display but simultaneously hiding as they traveled to England for an abortion. Contributors also described camaraderie with, and support from, other women, particularly family members across generations. These women’s narratives contested the silence about reproductive realities that dominated Irish society for so long. For many contributors to IHS, posting was a radical act that helped overcome Ireland’s legacy of shame.
The activist movement to bring legal abortion to Ireland was far from perfect; forums such as IHS have been criticized for featuring middle-class, white cis women and minimizing the experiences of LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and Travellers. The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act (2019) also contained limits: it allowed for abortion only up through twelve weeks of a pregnancy, required a three-day waiting period between a doctor’s visit and an abortion, and permitted some practitioners to refuse abortion care.
Still, movements like IHS provide a hopeful example for us today. Through social media, contributors to IHS demanded that the nation not erase the horrors of the past but rather recognize them and give women space to talk about them. As they raised their voices and expressed themselves in their own words, contributors contested the passive, sentient ideal of domesticity that historically informed women’s lives in Ireland and set a precedent for twenty-first-century activism in Ireland and beyond. The recent assaults on abortion rights in the United States, Poland, and elsewhere make the need for grassroots feminist activism centered on story-telling and truth-telling only more evident.
Cara Delay, Professor of History at the College of Charleston, holds degrees from Boston College and Brandeis University. Her research analyzes women, gender, and culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland, with a particular focus on the history of reproduction, pregnancy, and childbirth. Her award-winning body of scholarship includes more than 30 scholarly journal articles and chapters. She is also author of Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850-1950 (Palgrave), Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism, 1850-1950 (Manchester), and Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford). In addition to a Fulbright Scholar fellowship, she has received a Carol Gold Best Article Award (Council for Women in History), an AAUW American fellowship, and a Donnelly Foundation Award. At the College of Charleston, she teaches courses on women’s history and the history of birth and bodies.
Beth Sundstrom, Ph.D., M.P.H. is an associate professor of communication and public health at the College of Charleston, South Carolina where she was awarded the 2018 William V. Moore Distinguished Teacher-Scholar Award. She is the Director of the Women’s Health Research Team (WHRT), a member of the graduate faculty, and a faculty affiliate in the Women’s & Gender Studies program. Dr. Sundstrom also holds an adjunct assistant professor appointment at the Brown University School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and serves as a faculty affiliate in the Cancer Control Program at Hollings Cancer Center (HCC). Dr. Sundstrom conducts applied research that bridges the gap between theory and practice, informing the development of community-based public health interventions and communication campaigns. She is a Fulbright Scholar and leading expert on health communication, social marketing, and women’s health. Dr. Sundstrom is the author of Reproductive Justice and Women’s Voices: Health Communication across the Lifespan (Lexington Books, 2015) and Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020) along with more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles.
Published December 7, 2022