In much the same way that we reclaimed ownership of our bodies, so too is a movement where we seize back our basic, fully achievable right to homes and safe shelter the only way from here… We know they would not have listened to us then had we not risen up and made them. It’s time to make them listen again (Redmond 2018a).

One of the challenges in our ongoing work to bring the best possible abortion care into being (Enright et al. 2018; Fletcher et al. 2018), is how to draw on the interdependence of the movement and connect up the practical work on implementation of #RepealedThe8th with a broader feminist commitment to making the ‘reproduction of life’ central to politics. Feminists have long argued that the ‘reproduction of life’ includes, but is not just about having, and not having, babies (see further Bhattacharya 2017; Roberts 1997; Fletcher 2005). The practical activities that go into the sustenance of our communities and the generation of economic networks make up the reproduction of life. Such activities generate value and embodied forms of property, contributions which are essential to capitalism and its need for replenished labour power, but are dressed up and taken from us as feminized and racialised ‘gifts’.

The deficit of housing and shelter has been much on people’s minds through and since the referendum. The willingness to blame mothers for the absence of a roof over children’s heads expressed itself with force in the weeks that followed. Margaret Cash, a Traveller single mother of seven children, bravely called for public support as she drew people’s attention to her reliance on the police station for shelter (O’Brien and Burns 2018) and was met with a torrent of racist and misogynist abuse. When feminists argue for the recognition and value of the unpaid activities which make sure children get fed, or bring people together to set up homes or occupy streets, they, we, are drawing attention to a reproductive economy of life, which needs direct and indirect sustenance.

This reproductive connection between abortion and everything that matters about life, has had, and continues to have, a visceral impact on social struggle in Ireland, struggles which seep over borders. As I write, the grief over the untimely death of a trans woman (Power 2018) being detained in a men’s direct provision centre in Galway has been buried in the grief sweeping the country through the Pope’s visit (Ryan 2018; on the link between trans justice and current abortion law reform see Duffy 2018). Having to tolerate the Pope visiting Ireland at the state’s request and on the state’s euro 4 months after the referendum was a trial for many. At one level the papal visit hurt because it represented the reassertion of a public power that has been eroded, an erosion to which #RepealedThe8th testifies (O’Gorman 2018). But worse that than it was a reminder of the continuing failure of state and church to take meaningful action to address the harms to survivors and non-survivors of sexual and reproductive abuse, incarceration, forced adoption and disappearance (Enright 2018a; Gallen 2019; Gallen and Gleeson 2017; Ring 2017).

This failure pours salt into the wounds of those who are calling for openness, information and redress, as apologies such as that made by Kenny (2013), then Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister), to the Magdalene women have not been translated into material goods such as meaningful access to healthcare and information about lost loved ones (Clann Project 2018; Justice for Magdalenes 2013; Gleeson 2017; O’Rourke 2011). Colm O’Gorman, a survivor of clerical sexual abuse, current director of Amnesty Ireland, founding member of One in Four, and key player in the Marriage Equality Referendum retold his story as he called for people to gather in the Garden of Remembrance at the time of the Papal Mass (O’Gorman 2018). Thousands of people gathered at #Stand4Truth not to protest, but to use their physical presence to provide shelter for those who had suffered sexual abuse. They then walked silently to Sean McDermott Street, the site of the last state-owned Magdalene laundry which closed in 1996, and gave material form to the grief, anger, and solidarity that continues to haunt #RepealThe8th and its afterlife.

#Stand4Truth and other moments in the immediate afterlife of #RepealedThe8th help us make sense of the incomplete reparations being done through repeal. They are intimately connected to earlier moments of reproductive injustice. The significance of repeal is almost unknowable without an appreciation for the lives lost and damaged along the way, without all the incomplete stories of the Mother and Baby Homes, the Magdalene laundries and the Industrial Schools. The stories of two individual women, Ann Lovett and Joanne Hayes, who had been the subjects of reproductive injustices 34 years previously (Maguire 2001) became particularly present as the campaign neared referendum day. They became part of the narrative of repeal as a form of restoration, as a means of valuing the rest of reproductive life.

Ann Lovett was a 15 year old girl who died alone near a grotto in rural Ireland, shortly after giving birth to her son who also died. On 5th May 2018, 20 days before the referendum, Rosita Boland published an interview with Ricky McDonnell, Ann Lovett’s boyfriend of the time (Boland 2018). In this, his first public utterance, he shared a moving account of their relationship, how he learned of her death, and its impact on him afterwards. A few months previously, in January 2018, the Gardaí (police) made a public apology for the mistreatment of Joanne Hayes (Bohan 2018), a woman who had been wrongly accused of the murder of her baby in 1984, and subjected to 5 days of intrusive questioning during a tribunal which was supposed to be investigating Garda misconduct (see further Conway and Daly 2017; McCafferty 1985). The apology came as the decision to hold a referendum was being made and as the Oireachtas considered the recommendations of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment.

Repeal, like the women’s strike, is a process not an event (Gago 2018, 663). Its temporality cannot be, is not, reduced to the single date of 25th May 2018, or as Redmond says the 13 weeks of the ‘official’ campaign (2018b), or even the 35 years between the vote to adopt and the vote to repeal. The moment of repeal contains so many other moments, including those that were more proximate to the result itself. There was the moment when we heard the exit poll (Enright 2018b), the one where we watched the votes being counted, the one where we heard the result declared to the sounds of joyful, unrestricted tears and cheers, the one when the court casesFootnote 33 ended, and a President, who had campaigned against the Eighth Amendment in 1983, signed the Thirty-Sixth Amendment Act into being.

While we think about the different moments captured by repeal and how they connect to the rest of reproductive life, we also need to think about replenishing repealers. How do we rest and restore ourselves as socio-legal participants at the same time as we seek the ongoing sustenance of reproductive life? One routine way that we do this is of course by gathering ourselves together whether at an activist workshop, academic conference or some other meeting place. One such opportunity came along in July 2018 as the Abortion and Reproductive Justice Conference was held in Makhanda, formerly Grahamstown, South Africa.Footnote 34 This was the first conference I attended after repeal, and the conference itself has an interesting travelling history. The first one was held in Prince Edward Island, Canada and the second one was held in Belfast, Northern Ireland (MacQuarrie et al. 2018; Bloomer et al. 2018).Footnote 35 So, as well as being a wonderful occasion to connect with the work of scholars and activists from all over, it was also the first point of connection for some of us that had been involved in Repeal but hadn’t seen each other since the days of the campaign.

When Michi Hyams of the Abortion Rights CampaignFootnote 36 spoke from the audience at the opening plenary and identified herself as an Irish abortion activist, the audience burst into spontaneous joyful applause. That uplifting moment was followed by a few more. When the Sexual and Reproductive Justice CoalitionFootnote 37 held a roundtable and talked about how they had come into being, it was one of the most moving conference experiences I’ve ever had. They seemed tired and worn out by local and global challenges as the effects of local obstructions and global gag rules made their work difficult. But as I watched sex worker and youth activists, health care practitioners and even a government official reflect together on how they fought to get sexual pleasure as well as sexual rights and health on the agenda, I was so touched by their performance of collective sustenance (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7 Members of the Sexual and Reproductive Justice Coalition gathering at the Abortion and Reproductive Justice III Conference, Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa, July 2018 Full size image

And then when Emma CampbellFootnote 38 and Siobhan ClancyFootnote 39 led their session on ‘Furies’,Footnote 40 it felt like they gave us the freedom to be (Figs. 8, 9). They gave us the freedom to be scholarly and practical, calm and outraged, performative and participatory, all at the same time. They draw on Marcus, Ahmed and others to think through anger, particularly as generated and communicated by survey responses and slogans from activists involved in repealthe8th. Their gift was attentive and futuristic in invoking the Furies, the Erinyes of Greek mythology that unwittingly carried obvious references to Irishness and yes votes, and transformed them from goddesses of vengeance to objects of feminist generation. And as they gave us this freedom, the making of a place where we could be ourselves in our apartness and in our togetherness, and various states in between, we gave them future furies. We made fury dolls out of twigs, leaves, string and paper, gave them names, and told stories of what bits of repeal, or equivalent, our fury dolls represented. These future furies circulated among us as a kind of ‘thingified’ energy that emerged from the stories and bodies that were there, and showed us how to stay going.

Fig. 8 Figures of Fury made by participants at the Abortion and Reproductive Justice III Conference, Makhanda, South Africa, July 2018 Full size image