I moved to Ireland in 2019, a year after abortion had become legal. As a woman born and raised in Germany, reproductive rights had never been a concern for me. I knew that if needed it, I had the option of termination.
I wasn’t aware of my privilege at the time. But when I made Ireland my home, I realised the weight of choosing to live in a country with such a conflicted relationship with reproductive rights.
Legalisation only marks the beginning of processing historical trauma, as well as ensuring that abortion services are accessible to all women living in Ireland.
For most of Irish history, women’s bodies were treated as, in legal terms, the property of religious and nationalist ideologies. Savita Halappanavar, a dentist who passed away in a Galway hospital in 2012 after being denied a life-saving abortion, became the face of the fight for legalisation. Her death followed the devastating cases of Sheila Hodgers, Miss Y and many others, where the lack of necessary abortion care led to women’s decline in physical or mental health, or death.
As a writer, I turn to literature to seek answers. Despite the burst of activist poetry leading up to the 2018 referendum, there is very little literary engagement with the realities of post-repeal Ireland. But legalisation hasn’t drawn a line under the conversation. The shame and silence around abortion are still palpable, and at the time of writing, no poetry collection on the subject has come out of Ireland.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean there is an absolute silence in poetry: In 2024, Amelia Loulli published Slip, the first single-authored collection on the subject in the UK. Milena Williamson, an American poet living in Belfast, wrote on the the theme in her poem An Irish Woman Travels to England. And Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa dedicated her poem Waking Again to Savita Halappanavar, in her 2021 collection To Star the Dark.
I believe that writing through that silence is an act of healing – and I am trying to start filling that void.
Representation of abortion in Irish literature
In pre- and early Christian Ireland, abortion was a common practice. In fact, Ireland had four saints associated with abortion: Brigid, Ciarán, Áed and Cainnech.
In their hagiographies, the books of the saints’ lives and the miracles they performed, St Brigid reportedly performed two miraculous “womb-healings” on women with unwanted pregnancies. St Ciarán, meanwhile, freed Bruinech, his mother’s young foster daughter, from conception following a rape.
St Áed and St Cainnech share similar abortion narratives: both made a nun’s pregnancy disappear, restoring the holy virgin’s “purity”. St Áed, however, at first fled when he discovered the nun’s pregnancy, only to return after she’d confessed her “sin” to the entire community. But the women’s perspectives in these stories are absent. A section of the poetry collection I am working on as part of my PhD seeks to give them a voice.
The 2018 referendum ensured for the first time that the female body could feel like a safe home in modern Ireland, marking its shift from being public and debated property. Women can now make reproductive choices in private, without the risk of criminal charges. While academic and journalistic writing can provide facts and opinions, poetry has the power to bring emotion to the forefront and make diverse abortion experiences tangible for the reader.
A poem from my project is written in the form of a medical abortion consent form issued by the Health Service Executive as a standard procedure before medications are handed out. It begins:
You have been fully informed of, and understand to your complete satisfaction.
The poem then replaces the form’s clinical language with conflicting emotions, such as relief, grief and uncertainty that the bureaucratic forms do not hold space for:
You’ll ask the Tarot cards for their blessing. You will pull the 7 of Cups. After dreaming every possible scenario, you must choose your cup. All of them are cold to the touch.
Poetry can build a bridge between medical language and women’s lived realities. And what’s more, it can foster empathy without pushing political agendas. It holds space for the full spectrum of abortion experiences. Abortion is rarely a straightforward choice and a poem can balance contradictions without judgement.
Since 2018, Ireland has taken significant steps towards becoming a safer home for women, where women’s lives come first. But rights on paper do not automatically guarantee rights in practice and there are still improvements to be made in terms of access.
As a relative newcomer to Ireland, I haven’t had to carry the traumas that weigh on generations of women. Perhaps the silence on abortion in poetry has something to do with the processing and healing after the long fight for reproductive rights. My collection on the subject aims to uncover and gather stories from the past and to write into the present, while acknowledging that my perspective is only one voice among many.
Although poetry cannot make laws, it can help us process past trauma and create visions for the future. Poems can make us sit with the spectrum of complexity involved in reproductive decisions – the discomfort, grief, relief and joy. I’d like to see more poems about difficult choices, about owning our bodies and about the nuances beyond the yes/no binary of the referendum. That conversation has only just begun.
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