ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the interplay between the state, gender and discourse in the area of abortion politics. It focuses on how the state mediates between competing discourses on abortion and on how fields of discursivity structure the abortion debate. It draws on the theoretical work of R.W. Connell on gender relations and that of Michel Foucault on discourse and the deployment of sexuality in order to specify state interests in abortion. Specifically it makes use of this corpus of theory in the case study based on the Republic of Ireland. The issue of abortion first appeared on the Irish political agenda in the early 1980s with a campaign to insert into its Constitution a clause which purported to guarantee the right to life of the unborn. After a bitterly intense debate, the Irish electorate duly voted in a national referendum in 1983 to amend the Constitution accordingly (Hesketh 1990). It then reappeared on the agenda after a sensational judicial interpretation of this clause in the landmark X-case in 1992 which declared that abortion was legal in Ireland in certain circumstances.
