ABSTRACT
Well before 1967, when abortion was decriminalized in most of Britain, women in Ireland who were attempting to manage their fertility engaged in important yet understudied exchanges with the former colonizer. This essay explores the material exchanges associated with fertility control, and particularly abortion, in post-independence Ireland (the Free State and later the Republic) by examining the exchange and trade of both bodies and material goods between Ireland and parts of Britain. Through an analysis of abortion criminal trial cases from 1922 to 1967, newspapers, advertisements, and pamphlets, it demonstrates that even after independence, Irish women were woven into networks of travel, advertising, communication, and economic exchange with Britain and its former empire. They moved their bodies across national spaces to access abortion, but they also bought and sold abortion pills and contraceptives. As they did so they challenged contemporary constructions of Irish womanhood and national identity.
