r procreative purposes" (Whitty 854). Divorce was illegal. The state vigorously enforced the 1929 and 1935 censorship laws under which the sale or importation of contraceptives and the dissemination of information on contraception or abortion were made criminal offenses. Abortion itself was unlawful under Section 58 of the 1861 British Offenses Against the State Act which remains in force in both Northern Ireland and the Republic.
The major maternity hospitals in Ireland are privately owned by Catholic religious orders and are funded in large part by the state. To this day, abortions are not performed there. Pearce comments that "Irish doctors are conservatives . . . and nursing staff even more reactionary" (400). There is a long history of backstreet abortions and infanticide. Babies born out of wedlock doubled during the 1970s; by 1990 they amounted to 14.5 percent of all births (Whitty 888). In traditional Ireland, an unwanted pregnancy was a disgrace, but "any woman who has an abortion is considered by many to be a murderer, ostracized by the community and disowned by her family" (O'Callaghan 24).
In Great Britain, abortion became legal under the 1967 Abortion Act, provided that two physicians were willing to certify that termination of a pregnancy is necessary because the mother's life is threatened by serious physical or mental problems. For those women who sought an abortion and who could afford the fare across the sea, the obvious solution was to have the procedure done in England, which at least 37,000 Irish women, one out of every 20 women of childbearing age, did in the 1980s. Approximately 5,000 Irish women having an abortion there gave an Irish address in 1994 (Supreme Court Affirms Abortion Law 380). Pearce says that "the true rate of abortion may have been significantly higher" (387).
The women's rights movement first gathered force in both Northern and Southern Ireland in the 1960s when the first illegal fami...