Life unsettled: debating abortion in the US Supreme Court and the Irish Citizens’ Assembly

Abstract

This article examines polyvalent uses of the word ‘life’ in the debate about abortion in the United States compared with Ireland. It takes two axiomatically liberal events as its ethnographic site of comparison: the US Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, and the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which led to a referendum and the legalization of 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.