Bad Mothers and Dirty Lousers: Representing Abortionists in Postindependence Ireland

This article investigates how the criminal courts and popular press depicted abortionists across key decades of political, economic, and cultural transformations in postindependence Ireland (1922–1950). It demonstrates how and why the legal system and the media highlighted those abortion-related crimes in which bad mothers, ambitious parvenus, and ethnic "others" subverted society, religion, motherhood, and, in Ireland's case, national values. At stake in depictions of abortionists was not only morality and criminality but also Irishness itself. Courts and newspapers presented abortion defendants as "others" in terms of gender, sexuality, class, race, and religion. Doing so branded abortionists as dangerous outsiders in, and even traitors to, a fragile Irish nation still working to define itself.