In 2018, 841,233 people in Ireland told the Eroctis to repeal the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution,

which stated that a person and the fetus living inside their body had an equal right to life.

Four years later, it took just nine Supreme Court justices to move America half a century

in the opposite direction, overturning Rovey Wade and effectively banning abortion in half

of US states, despite 57% of Americans disagreeing with them. Much like what toilets trans people use,

whether or not someone carries a child to term is simply not a problem for the majority of ordinary

people. In fact, the Catholic Church only started caring about it relatively recently, nor is it

a moral crusade. Rather, abortion is a crisis manufactured by the upholders of white supremacist

patriarchal capitalism, including the religious right, but also the police and carceral system

conservative and indeed liberal politicians to keep people in their place by keeping fetuses

in theirs. Understanding this can help us explain how it came to be that a socially

conservative country like Ireland liberalized its abortion laws while the self-proclaimed leader

of the free world restricted them. It also explains why struggles around abortion aren't over

in Ireland or anywhere else. Camilla Fitzsiamonds works at Maynuth University in County Kildare and

is a pro-choice activist. Strange then that the title of her book repealed Ireland's unfinished

fight for reproductive rights, published in November by Pluto Press, makes no mention of abortion

at all. The reason, as you'll hear from our conversation, is to correct a tendency latent in

pro-choice movements to think of abortion as a single issue, a right that all people should have

access to. Following in the footsteps of Latinx and black feminists of the 70s onwards,

Fitzsiamonds argues that a person's right to an abortion doesn't exist in a vacuum, but instead

is conditioned by things like their class, race and legal status. We need to think not only about

enabling to terminate abortions in other words, but why certain people end up needing them in the

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