Comparative exploration of Reproductive Citizenship in RoI and NI having regard to different democratic pathways to recent legalisation of abortion in both jurisdictions.

Up until 2019 abortion was illegal under the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act on both parts of the island of Ireland. In 2018-2019 both jurisdictions repealed the 1861 Act and legalised abortion. But very different pathways were taken to legalization. In the Republic of Ireland, a highly developed participatory democracy path was followed involving a Citizen’s Assembly, Joint Oireachtas Committee and a referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Constitution and the 1861 Act. In Northern Ireland, during suspension of the devolved government, Westminister implemented an amendment to the NI Executive Formation Bill to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to NI, repealing the 1861 Act in the absence of Stormont being restored. This study will explore how these contrasting democratic processes to legalising abortion shape reproductive citizenship on the island using a Grounded Theory Situational Analysis (GTSA) methodology. The core data-set will comprise experiential accounts of women seeking abortion care on both parts of the island since legalisation generated using qualitative interviewing. These will be analysed to compare articulations of reproductive citizenship featuring in interview narratives. GTSA method of mapping the situational arena, the social world arena and the positional arena directed at understanding the “dense complexities of a particular situation broadly conceived†(Clarke, Friese and Washburn, 2018) will be innovatively applied here for comparative analysis. This unusual event of an Act pre-existing partition being repealed simultaneously on both parts of the island but via highly contrasting mechanisms featuring highly contrasting degrees of local and participatory democracy, represents a case study with rich and unique potential to explore effects at the level of citizenship.