Feminist Encounters: Special Issue on Repealing the 8th: Irish Reproductive Activism

Information on Repealing the 8th: Irish Reproductive Activism

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“The ‘Repealing the 8th: Irish Reproductive Activism’ special issue includes twelve articles, by eighteen contributors, and all but one of which were part of a larger group who made submissions to the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies’ Fall 2019 call for papers on a proposed Special Issue of the Journal on ‘Repealing the 8th Amendment’. It also includes one topic-related article that was not part of the response to this submission. Submissions were made in response to the call for papers announced at the Canadian Association of Irish Studies’ conference, ‘Irish Bodies and Irish Worlds,’ hosted by Concordia University, Montréal, Canada, 29 May to 1 June 2019. Three guest editors, none of whom had any direct associations with the campaign to repeal the 8th Amendment, were also announced at that time. In autumn, 2019, the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (CJIS) circulated the call for papers and published it on the scholarly association’s website. Submissions were accepted by the journal issue’s three guest editors during the winter, 2019, and, at one point, deadlines were extended to accommodate their receipt in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contributors received confirmation of their submissions and in early June 2020, the special issue’s three guest editors noted that submissions included ‘a terrific list of contributors’ and the three guest editors indicated their intention to send submissions out for the peer review process.

It was surprising then, on 17 July 2020, when contributors received an email message indicating the cancellation of the special issue on Repealing the 8th Amendment. This decision was initially taken by the guest editors without consultation with the journal’s Editorial Board. Contributors, who had assumed that their submissions were in the process of peer review, demanded some answers. The explanations that were offered through email correspondence carried very little weight. The guest editors claimed that they had been ‘advised to seek legal advice’ and had received ‘unanimous advice that…continuing with the issue could be highly problematic.’ Claims about why this might have been the case pushed the boundaries of reason. They claimed that the publication was unfeasible ‘in the climate of a global public health crisis.’ They claimed that publication would violate Irish defamation laws; when pushed on this, they readily admitted that the submissions–none of which had actually been sent for peer review–did not contain any content that was identified as defamatory. In fact, they acknowledged that ‘there was no legal judgment made on the individual articles or scholarship’. They claimed that the publication of the volume could attract ‘significantly more attention than we [the guest editors] had initially anticipated.’ They claimed that the negative attention would be brought to bear on the Canadian Association of Irish Studies (CAIS). They claimed that negative attention also would be brought to bear on some of the contributors themselves, many of whom have published previously about abortion in Ireland and elsewhere. They claimed that the intended journal issue could serve as a ‘blunt instrument for controversy,’ ‘rather than as a body of articles assessed on the astuteness of their analysis.’ They declared the proposed special issue to be ‘a problem’. As readers of this volume, we leave it up to you to decide about the allegedly problematic nature of these astute scholarly analyses.

The contributors to this volume, (who found their way to one another through their scholarly and activist connections) assumed that a reasonable conversation with the journal’s editor (which changed midway through this process), Editorial Board members (some of whom have since resigned their positions on the journal), and the Canadian Association of Irish Studies Executive members (now under new leadership) would lead to a reversal of the guest editors’ decision. This was not to be the case. Members of the journal’s editorial boards (comprised of Associate Editors and Editorial Board members, but excluding the guest editors) requested a meeting, but the Association’s Executive Committee members declined to meet with them. Exchanges between the contributors of this issue and the Association’s Executive Committee went back and forth over a period of fourteen months. There were letters from the contributors who demanded some accountability for the decision and responses from supporters of the decision to censor the issues. One individual, who supported the censorship commented, perhaps naively, that the contributors’ tone seemed ‘very angry.’ After fourteen months, the journal made a vague offer to consider publication, but it refused to answer all questions about the status of the previously sought legal opinion or about the effects of this legal opinion for future publication.

What remains highly problematic about this entanglement is the issue of academic censorship. The topic of abortion has a long history of silence and repression in Ireland. Laws about censorship were deployed historically to silence women and deny them opportunities to know themselves, their bodies, and to share their knowledge with others. Indeed, one of the most significant contributions of the Repeal campaign during the public referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment was the opportunity for a women-led, grassroots campaign, to tell difficult and painful stories and to do so publicly where the stories would be heard. Furthermore, the discipline of Irish Studies has a poor history of engaging with women, including as scholars of Irish history and society. This decision was a missed opportunity to address this relatively poor history of engagement. It seems short-sighted to let this particular journal (CJIS) have such a decisive say over what could be said and heard about abortion in Ireland and the contributors worked together to seek a new forum for publication for their analyses. It goes without saying how grateful we are to Feminist Encounters for working with us in a wholly professional and transparent manner to publish this collection of articles. As guest editors of this special issue, we are also grateful to all the contributors for enduring an unanticipated and protracted period of acrimony around the issue of academic censorship. We are also grateful to others who have forged ahead during this period to continue to publish comment on the 8th Amendment, the referendum outcome, and its significance for Ireland, Northern Ireland, and for Irish Studies, many of whom are cited within these articles and many others.

We, the editors of, and contributors to, this issue, are galvanised by our belief that these analyses are vital because they represent a variety of academic disciplines and methodological lenses, all working together to understand the full impact of the Repeal the 8th campaign on reproductive rights in Ireland and globally. Moreover, we believe that the process by which this contributors’ group has formed contains echoes of the collaborations and tensions that were present during the campaign themselves. Our varied frameworks and experiences inform our priorities and approaches to academic collaboration, and when faced with concerns that the feminism which underpins both scholarship and activism will be ‘problematic’ it was necessary for us to consider our response as individuals and as a group, and to clarify together what values and priorities should guide us. Within this group are academics at many stages of their careers as well as non-academic activists whose experiences should be acknowledged as valuable insights. Together, we considered what potential damage there might be to our livelihoods, careers, and the organisations to which we belong, and confirmed the priorities that led us to this labour. By collaborating in our responses to the co-editors of CJIS and within this issue of Feminist Encounters, we push back against the narrative that reproductive choice and the socio-political discourses surrounding it are inappropriate topics to address through scholarly analysis. Instead, we again claim that they are necessary topics and require multiple, sometimes conflicting, scholarly approaches.

This dialogue continues to be recognised as important by other scholarly journals, presses, and production companies, including a special issue of Feminist Review (Abortion in Ireland, 2020), a special issue of Éire-Ireland (Reproductive Justice and the Politics of Women’s Health, 2021), and number of books including After Repeal (Zed Books, 2020), In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth (New World Books, 2020), It’s a Yes: How Together for Yes Repealed the Eighth and Transformed Irish Society (Orpen Press, 2019), In the Shadow of the Eighth: My Forty Years Working for Women’s Health in Ireland(Penguin Ireland, 2019), Rise Up and Repeal: A Poetic Archive of the Eighth Amendment (Sad Press, 2019), and films, The 8th (Persister Films, 2020) and When Women Won (Irish Film Institute, 2020). These analyses sit alongside other efforts, undertaken by scholars, scholar-activists, activist groups and by the Irish government, to reassess the implications of the Health Termination of Pregnancy Act 2018. Lorraine Grimes worked alongside the Abortion Rights Campaign to publish Too Many Barriers: Experiences of Abortion in Ireland after Repeal (Abortion Rights Campaign, 2021) and the government of Ireland announced that it will appoint an independent expert to review the implementation of the current law. This ongoing issue remains important for Irish Studies and these scholarly analyses are contributions that cannot be silenced easily.”