Editors' Introduction: Women's Health and Reproductive Justice in Ireland

We began conceiving of this special issue in the heady weeks and months following the May 2018 vote to repeal the republic's antiabortion Eighth Amendment (1983). For just a moment all things seemed possible in terms of Irish women's health-care rights and realities. Even then, however, our training in reproductive justice—a framework created by American Black women encouraging us to move beyond a rights-based or legalistic framework to instead focus on intersectional access to women's bodily autonomy and the real-world contexts of reproduction (Ross, Radical Reproductive Justice; Ross, "What Is Reproductive Justice?"; Sister Song; Silliman et al.)—cautioned us against being overly optimistic. In working and living in the United States, we knew firsthand that legality often is less important to abortion access than a person's race or ethnicity, region, immigration status, and/or socioeconomic status.¹ In late 2018, despite the referendum in the republic, the actual abortion legislation that would emerge was unclear. Moreover, Ireland's healthcare system, especially for women, had long been, as Jo Murphy-Lawless's work both here and previously has exposed, particularly dismal (Murphy-Lawless, "The Silencing of Women in Childbirth"; Murphy-Lawless, Reading Birth and Death). When limited legal abortion was introduced in the republic in early 2019, and, later that year, Northern Ireland took steps to decriminalize abortion, it became evident that actually providing abortion services island-wide would be a complicated endeavor, one that necessitated a careful examination of the entire health-care system (Bloomer et al.). Thus a more general context of women's health in Ireland helps to elucidate and unpack the complexities and impact of the postrepeal moment. This is just one of the reasons that this special issue's substantial charting of the repeal campaign, momentum, and moment is placed alongside work that explores women's health in Ireland more generally, both past and present.

Reproductive Justice and the Politics of Women's Health

The legacies of the past—the shame conjoined with female sexuality, the "architecture of containment" (Smith), and "shame-industrial complex" (Hogan, Republic of Shame) that placed the "deviant" in institutions, and the reality that the state consistently "has protected its institutions rather than women themselves" (Murphy-Lawless in this issue)—not only troubled Irish women's access to legal abortion but also affected the health care that they received more generally, North and South. As several essays in this issue suggest, the island's history of institutionalization in Magdalen laundries, asylums, and mother-and-baby homes should also be read alongside the realities of inadequate health care for women and their oppressions by and through the medical establishment. Biopower, writes Abby Bender in this issue, "seeps into the other spaces of the nation." More specifically, the essays collated here encourage us to expand the notion of Smith's "architecture of containment" to include hospitals and indeed all health-care systems on the island.² Murphy-Lawless's essay, for example, explains how the maternity-care system's neoliberal, "consumer-choice" worldviews and policies have resulted in not only deficient care but in some cases tragic and unnecessary maternal deaths. The Irish health-care system's neglect of and negligence toward women is also a key focus of Beth Sundstrom's article in this issue on the cervical-cancer prevention crisis in Ireland. So too is Luz Mar Gonzalez-Arias's analysis of Celia de Fréine's poetry collection Blood Debt, an important work that stages a powerful reckoning of the medical establishment with respect to the hepatitis C scandal, which saw 1,600 women contract the virus through infected Anti-D immunoglobulin in the 1970s and 1990s. Through the voice of a poetic speaker who was infected with hepatitis C, de Fréine's collection hauntingly explores the politics of women's embodiment, health, and trauma. This special issue of Éire-Ireland contains one of de Fréine's poems, "scéal scéil"/"hearsay," from Fiacha Fola (2004) and Blood Debts (2014), which...