Paper short abstract:

This paper compares and contrasts public reasoning about abortion in the US Supreme Court versus the Irish Citizens Assembly.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines polyvalent uses of the word ‘life’ in debate about abortion in the US versus Ireland. It takes two axiomatically liberal events as its ethnographic site of comparison: the US Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade, and the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which led to a referendum that legalised abortion. Drawing on the textual and audiovisual artefacts produced by these events, it argues that both cases challenge the Habermasian vision of public reason, especially the expectation that reasons must be translated into a secular register to become universally applicable law. More than this, it argues that neither of these events can be understood as straightforwardly liberal. Rather, in both cases, key decisions are made regarding women’s reproductive autonomy when liberal and non-liberal, secular and religious, forms of reasoning find strategic common ground—however fleeting.