When they put their hands out like scales: Film (4mins 31 secs) 2012 © Emma Campbell, Ulster University

National ideals of motherhood and acceptable female behaviour are threaded through the anti-choice arguments. To try and represent the ‘abortion journey’ experience, in effect this work becomes the “fulcrum of a much broader ideological struggle in which the very meanings of family, the state, motherhood, and ...women’s sexuality are contested”.
In the grounds surrounding Stormont, the seat of government in Northern Ireland, we hide in the cold and unwelcoming outside world, and the obfuscatory language used by political representatives is parallelled with the dreary loneliness of the surrounding environment. Eventually, as we move towards the docks, the sea becomes the abortion seeker’s only escape.