Event review: The Gals Gig for Repeal

This was a blog review I wrote in 2016 about an event I attended in aid of repealing the Eighth Amendment in Ireland which recognised the equal right to life of the pregnant woman and the unborn. I.e. it was illegal to have abortions under any conditions. As you'll hear while reading from this outraged 21 year old, I believed the law a shameful example of the State controlling its "subjects". The amendment has since been repealed.

Cultural critic Nina Power has said that the fact the “height of female emancipation coincides perfectly with consumerism” is a “miserable index of a politically bereft time”. We can buy all the boob jobs and dildos we want, but we mustn't dare let this symbolic freedom of consumerism give us any big ideas about owning these bodies we buy for. Even when we're encouraged to follow our ambitions for a highly successful career, it's often at the implicit cost of love or a family, because we can't have it all. So, if released from the shackles of motherhood, you still must remember that in the workplace you are otherwise restrained, by needing to look presentable, selling yourself, networking and being extremely grateful at all times for how you've made it, against all odds. Postfeminism blows!

There. Tone set for this piece about where I was at the weekend. A gig to raise awareness for the importance of women making decisions about their body. How are we still only talking about repealing the eighth?! Sinéad O'Connor laments.

The concept of Essentialism states that there are innate, essential differences between men and women. We therefore have natures which override our "rational" selves, meaning that many of our choices are of biological origin. Nature over nur... reason. Therefore, it is necessary for some people to be mastered, subject to knowledge, controlled and harnessed to the will and power of the rational subject (white, western middle class Irish men who know more about female reproductive processes than those who go through it themselves). As it stands, in the Republic, abortion is prohibited in all circumstances save in “substantial” risk to the life of the woman: certification of suicidality by no less than six medical professionals is required (straight on to WikiHow: how do I prove my trauma?) Whether South or North of the border, those who dare defy the dictate face punishment in the form of a prison sentence of up to fourteen years. The Government’s neglect of the abortion referendum in the recent General Election debates speaks volumes about the level of necessity placed on it as an issue, as well as the constant lack of coverage the issue receives on our national airwaves.

I supported the cause of this fundraiser because of its drive to get an answer as to why abortion is a constitutional right as opposed to a human right. The religious dogma that binds our bodily autonomy and forces us to live by a chosen morality is one that is outdated, evidenced by the level of young people supporting this repeal, those largely disenchanted with the Catholic Church and its restraints. The gig was comprised of performances in a variety of mediums, from music to slam poetry and speech making, all of which entertainment we enjoyed for a mere nine blips. Eight Stories ran the event, an organisation committed to conveying personal stories of the pro-choicers in Ireland, chiefly using street art to promote nationwide discussion (or: divulging intensely private information they should not have to). Many males were involved in the dialogue too. Organisers of the Repeal Project were there, those entrepreneurial activists seeking to give mobilising visibility to this issue through jumpers and other apparel brandishing the 6 letter word boldly and simply. In black and white too, symbolising how cut and dry this issue should be: either women have control over their own body, or they don’t.

Source: British Vogue

In the wake of our newfound freedom, women were expected to reproduce the Irish state by reproducing for it. The Free State of 1922 provides the historical context for this repressive sexual moral climate; the female body became the site on which the anti-protestant ideology of the state-building process would be inscribed. When women are reduced to mere vessels or wombs, they are stripped of their personhood. This motherhood mandate women were expected to live by has ties to essentialist feminism which theorises that women are innately capable of nurture and affection, owing to their biology. Gender theorist Judith Butler would disagree, as she views gender as a construct and not as an internal reality: “That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (a girl in the bathroom queue behind me walked straight into the empty fella’s jacks assuring us, ‘I’ve read Judith Butler, gender is a myth, I can use this bathroom…’)

This biopower, which involves natural life coming under the calculation and regulation of State power, was orchestrated according to the teachings of the Church, practices so ingrained and unchallenged by society that they became habitual and an illusion of ‘normality’. However, the new generation are pushing for change because the insidious and invisible nature of symbolic violence as a mode of domination which acts upon women is no longer going unrecognised. This was echoed by Ailbhe Smyth (Convenor of the Coalition to Repeal the 8th Amendment) in her speech on the night, as she insisted that young people are the wind behind our sails. Although, Anna Cosgrave (founder of the Repeal Project), had a particular Call to Action: "don’t just talk to the people already pro-choice. Have the uncomfortable conversations and get people thinking."

Television writer Graham Linehan recently spoke out about his personal experience of “gothic horror” and “barbarism”, because despite a fatal abnormality, his British wife was not permitted an abortion in Ireland. The trauma that continuing with the hopeless pregnancy would put the mother through was disregarded. Many can’t afford to travel to the UK, and in these cases, Irish law forces women to deliver the foetus no matter what the impact on their physical or mental health (rape victims are no exception), as the foetus must be protected above all else. In 2012, Savita Halappanavar died of sepsis in Galway; Halappanavar’s mistreatment, a more recent and controversial episode in Ireland’s (bio)politics of birth, was described by the coroner as a "medical misadventure". Savita’s widower, Praveen, said the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) “placed far too great an emphasis on the existence of the foetal heartbeat” while his wife was under its care, ignoring her own rights. Praveen accepted an apology from the senior midwife, who had explained that a termination wasn’t possible because Ireland is “a Catholic country”. An apology from this woman conceals the principal evil, the law.

Historically, Ireland’s biopolitics of birth involved incarcerating thousands of ‘fallen' women in Magdalene laundries run by religious orders between 1922 and 1996, as these women did not prescribe to the type of motherhood the Catholic Church idealised. The interdefinition of womanhood and motherhood is evident in the Irish Constitution where the word ‘mother’ is used interchangeably with the word ‘woman’ in Articles 41,2.1/41.2.

Pierre Bourdieu says that sexual relations are constructed through the fundamental principle of “division between the active male and the passive female”, which can also be applied here differently and despondently; it is largely active males, who, in the court of law, can deny women abortions and incarcerate them if they do not oblige. Without agency over their own reproductive organs, women are, in present day, still being treated as inferior biologically, sexually and intellectually.

In these situations, the body ceases to be a mere biological entity and rather becomes a socially constructed product which informs our identity, our apparent sole identity as baby-makers. I am Jenni, baby-maker.