This book reframes the Irish abortion narrative within the history of women’s reproductive health and explores the similarities and differences that shaped the history of abortion within the two states on the island of Ireland. Since the legalisation of abortion in Britain in 1967, an estimated 200,000 women have travelled from Ireland to England for an abortion. However, this abortion trail is at least a century old and began with women migrating to Britain to flee moral intolerance in Ireland towards unmarried mothers and their offspring. .This study highlights how attitudes to unmarried motherhood reflected a broader cultural acceptance that morality should trump concerns regarding maternal health. This rationale bled into social and political responses to birth control and abortion and was underpinned by an acknowledgement that in prioritising morality some women would die.
A new reflection on rape in wartime, this collection of essays presents 14 case studies, covering conflicts from across the globe, including Greece, Bangladesh, Columbia, Chechnya, Israel, India, Nigeria and Europe. Providing a truly global and interdisciplinary approach - including offerings from experts in legal, anthropological, cultural and gender studies - the authors examine the context in which wartime rape occurs, the specificity of rape as a universally recognised transgression, the place of large scale rape in public memories of war and the long term legacies of rape. They also confront the challenge of writing about intimate forms of violence from both the human and scientific perspective.