ABSTRACT
The Republic of Ireland’s public referendum on the 8th Amendment, in May 2018, is analysed as a visual contestation over its previous constitutional and legal restrictions on legal abortion access. I use select visual campaign images, on posters and in social media, to explain how and why this visual contestation is both specific to public debates in the Republic of Ireland and consistent with scholarly analyses of presentations and strategies of visual realignment in other, international contexts. Focusing on visual images used in two specific campaigns to oppose abortion reform, Save the 8th and Love Both, I demonstrate and analyse their intentional shifts away from a previously male-led leadership and public visual expressions of religious (Roman Catholic) viewpoints. However, I highlight the consistency of the campaigns’ retention of the public display of fetal-centric images and expose their distrust of pregnant people’s decision-making abilities. I locate these strategies and displays of ongoing visual entrenchment and realignment in the context of Kath Browne and Catherine Jean Nash’s “heteroactivist organizing” in Ireland that draws on racialized and nationalist visual discourses to oppose the liberalization laws, policies, and their actualization in contemporary post-colonial Ireland.
