"A Hundred Little Violences, a Hundred Little Wounds": Personal Disclosure, Shame, and Privacy in Ireland's Abortion Access

In 2018, after the final votes had been tallied in the Republic of Ireland's successful referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment, taoiseach Leo Varadkar tweeted, "Fantastic crowds at Dublin Castle. Remarkable day. A quiet revolution, a great act of democracy."¹ Ongoing efforts to reform Ireland's restrictive abortion laws were, however, far from quiet.² Advocacy for abortion reform long preceded the referendum and was public, visible, and often painful. Legal scholar Máiréad Enright characterizes the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment as inflicting harm. Reflecting on the labor of making legal change, Enright recalled, "I sat in a taxi while two women who had told their everyday abortion stories publicly wept together because they heard again and again in the public campaign talk that only exceptional abortions were legitimate. A hundred little violences. A hundred little wounds."³

In this article I examine the campaign for repeal, privacy, and public disclosure through personal storytelling in order to expose the complex relationships of shame and privacy to Irish reproductive politics. This particular strategy of abortion advocacy, comprised of self-disclosure and storytelling, was used extensively by individuals and groups to campaign for the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. Concurring with Clara Fisher's recognition of personal disclosure as an intentional deployment of visibility to counteract the state's historical exercise of shame, I argue that some public responses to the referendum campaign on abortion provided occasions where shame persisted.⁴ Some individuals who shared their stories incurred considerable personal risk: respect for their personal privacy rights was called into question, and they were harmed. Moreover, the state's historical strategies for public shaming—as well as confinement in state-supported institutions and geographic displacement through migration—persist in discrete forms in the legislative framework resulting from the referendum outcome that currently governs legal abortion access in Ireland.

In part one I outline the various ways that privacy is conceptualized and constructed as an obligation in domestic laws, judicial interpretations, and medical practice in Ireland, and briefly acknowledge Ireland's obligations to maintain privacy in international rights-based frameworks. I demonstrate how the Irish state has enacted privacy as a mechanism of reproductive control over bodies in order to construct preferred family forms and to establish a national gendered morality. I briefly recount the reliance of the Irish state, in cooperation with the Catholic church, on institutionalized forms of secrecy and shame to authorize a protectionist approach to privacy for individuals, communities, and the nation.⁵ Using specific examples from the 2018 referendum campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment, I expose public acts of judgment, condescension, shaming, and censorship that were exercised in an effort to restrict the influence of personal and collective narratives about abortion and to limit reforms.

Even during the referendum period, when abortion was an often-discussed topic, personal self-disclosure risked collective admonishment and personal harm.⁶ In part two I examine voluntary public disclosure through storytelling and intentional breeches of courtawarded anonymity in order to mobilize personal privacy to resist societal shaming through "visibility and disclosure," one of many strategies for encouraging reform.⁷ Telling stories publicly was one strategy used to press for reforms, and it proved to resonate with referendum voters. Personal storytelling, a routinely used device in feminist activism, was deployed as a subversive approach to publicly expose the limitations of abortion access and to inflict shame on the state for those limitations.⁸ The technique was used by repeal campaigners to persuade citizen-voters, an approach regarded as largely effective.⁹ Personal storytelling thus was an irretractable act, and once stories about abortion and abortion travel were recounted publicly, they could not be untold or unheard. It became difficult for individual storytellers to retreat into privacy and to resist contemporary forms of shaming and harm. In part two I analyze some consequences of this foregoing of personal privacy.

In part three I analyze present-day reforms, exposing their continuities with the Irish state's historical patterns of...