Beyond green and orange: alliance for choice – Derry’s mobilisation for the decriminalisation of abortion^*

* This work has benefited from the thoughtful comments and questions of attendees at the ‘Abortion and Reproductive Justice – The Unfinished Revolution II’ organised by the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland June 2016.

ABSTRACT

On 8 October 2014, the Northern Ireland Department of Justice (DoJ) set up a public consultation on amending the law on abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormality and sexual crimes. Several organisations mobilised to respond to the consultation, but pro-choice activists in Alliance for Choice-Derry (AfC-Derry) preferred to invest their time in popular education tactics  aimed at the greater public. Why did these activists refuse to lobby politicians, as they have done in the past, and instead mobilise for awareness-raising actions? In this article, I argue that the gender-blindness of the post-conflict consociational settlement in Northern Ireland restricted activists’ opportunity to lobby governments both at Stormont and Westminster. Activists thus shifted their approach to mobilisation: from lobbying to educational tactics; from extending UK’s 1967 Abortion Act to decriminalisation; and from targeting politicians to targeting culture. This analysis of pro-choice activism under the gender-blind, consociational political system in Northern Ireland will shed light on theoretical questions of gendered political structure constraints on feminist actions as well as the development of cultural tactics by a “critical community” during a period of abeyance.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist social movements
• pro-choice
• consociational power-sharing
• Northern Ireland

Acknowledgement

I would also like to thank Marcos Ancelovici, my supervisor at the time this project was conducted, and Judith Taylor, my supervisor at the time this was ready for publication. In their own way, they both have supported me in my fascination for the Northern Irish context and its brave pro-choice activists.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Marie-Lise Drapeau-Bisson is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada). She continues to be interested in abortion rights activism, in Ireland and Canada, as well as social movements’ cultural practices, feminist studies and qualitative methods.

Notes

* This work has benefited from the thoughtful comments and questions of attendees at the ‘Abortion and Reproductive Justice – The Unfinished Revolution II’ organised by the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland June 2016.

1 This act was not applied to Northern Ireland due to the opposition of the then devolved government.

2 As the anti-choice group, Precious Life, writes: ‘The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that private clinics, such as the Marie Stopes centre which opened its doors in Belfast in October 2012, cannot legally carry out abortions.’ (PreciousLife, 2014)

3 This name and all others cited in this chapter are pseudonyms attributed to interviewees. All interviews were conducted by myself during fieldwork in Northern Ireland in 2014.

4 Amnesty International launched its campaign ‘My Body, My Rights’ in Belfast on 21 October 2014, an international campaign with specific goals for Northern Ireland given this consultation (Amnesty International, 2014).

5 On their website, AfC states that they are an ‘organization that campaigns for the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland’ (Alliance for Choice, 2012).

6 The Steven Nolan Show is a popular Northern Ireland television programme that debates contemporary issues in the region.

7 There indeed exists an all-party pro-life group whose purpose is ‘[t]o uphold the sanctity of life, including the life of the unborn child and to promote a pro-life perspective in the Northern Ireland Assembly’. However, the latest visit on the archive site of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s website in March of 2019 indicates that the group now has some female members as well (http://archive.niassembly.gov.uk/index.htm).

8 For confidentiality purposes, Ms. Y is the name given to a young asylum seeker woman who arrived in Ireland in April 2014. After arriving, she discovered she was eight weeks pregnant and asked for a termination on the grounds of suicidal tendencies. Her request was refused and, despite a hunger strike, she was obliged to give birth to her child by caesarian section after 25 weeks of pregnancy (Holland, 2014). The case came out in the media on 18 August and many pro-choice activists, in both the North and South of Ireland, reacted by organising solidarity vigils for Ms. Y.

9 When asked by The Irish Times about the risk such an action entailed, Ms. Devlin answered: ‘We’re taking that chance, but we’re working on the basis that people have a social duty to uphold good law, but a moral responsibility to oppose bad law’ (Holland, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship Program Master’s Scholarships granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, as well as by the Bourses à la mobilité co-granted by the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Québec’s Ministère de l’Éducation, de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche (MEESR). The results of this research were presented thanks to the financial support of the Canada Research Chair in Sociology of Social Conflicts.