A pow­er­ful new film traces the cam­paign to lift Ireland’s abor­tion ban

Aideen Kane, Lucy Kennedy and Maeve O’Boyle’s doc­u­men­tary The 8^th may be filmed in Eng­lish, but in many ways protest is its pri­ma­ry lan­guage. Chart­ing the months lead­ing up to the 2018 ref­er­en­dum to over­turn Ireland’s con­tro­ver­sial Eighth Amend­ment, which for almost 35 years had effec­tive­ly crim­i­nalised abor­tion, the film is marked through­out by the voice of the peo­ple. Colour­ful plac­ards plas­tered with equal­ly colour­ful slo­gans (“Get your rosaries off my ovaries”) fill the screen, while angry chants of ​“Repeal the Eighth” echo through city squares, screamed over and over by impas­sioned crowds.

Released on the three-year anniver­sary of the his­toric vote and its sub­se­quent mile­stone vic­to­ry, the arrival of The 8^th feels even more pre­scient in the wake of the Black Lives Mat­ter and Kill the Bill demon­stra­tions that have tak­en place over the past year. ​“When we were going to fes­ti­vals some peo­ple were say­ing ​‘Well, how rel­e­vant is this real­ly giv­en that we’re in Covid and peo­ple can’t go out on the streets’,” Kennedy says. ​“And then George Floyd was killed and the protest move­ments in the US and oth­er parts of the world just erupt­ed. One of the things our film shows – and hon­est­ly one of the things that is ter­ri­fy­ing about the pro­posed leg­is­la­tion in the UK – is that protest is essen­tial for change.”

“A protest itself doesn’t make an activist or cause change imme­di­ate­ly,” agrees Kane, ​“but it’s incre­men­tal: it’s the pas­sion that it aris­es in peo­ple, and what that will ignite and spark. There is an agent of change in all of us.” This idea of grass­roots action is cen­tral to The 8^th, which fea­tures remark­ably lit­tle elec­toral pol­i­tics for a doc­u­men­tary hing­ing on the results of a ref­er­en­dum. Rather, this is a film that belongs to activists and com­mu­ni­ty organ­is­ers, locat­ing polit­i­cal agency with­in the actions of every­day peo­ple and reveal­ing the tire­less work that lies behind the col­lec­tive strug­gle for human dig­ni­ty. Bring­ing togeth­er a large cast of cam­paign­ers, notably from both sides of the debate, two activists in par­tic­u­lar take cen­tre stage: renowned fem­i­nist aca­d­e­m­ic Ailb­he Smyth, and Andrea Horan, own­er of Dublin-based nail and beau­ty salon Trop­i­cal Popical.

“The move­ment to change the Eighth Amend­ment was not some­thing that came from the Irish gov­ern­ment,” explains Kennedy, reflect­ing on their unique­ly com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven approach. ​“This was a hot pota­to before Jan­u­ary 2018: peo­ple didn’t even want to use the word abor­tion. It was from the activists, it was from the grass­roots, it was from peo­ple like Ailb­he who had been work­ing on it for 35 years.” O’Boyle adds, ​“When you’re doc­u­ment­ing some­thing as large as this, you have to have a real­ly enig­mat­ic pro­tag­o­nist. We met many incred­i­ble activists along the way, but Ailb­he had the his­to­ry: she was in her sev­en­ties and had lived through [the pass­ing of the Eighth Amend­ment] and had fought all the way along. This was her fight to win, and the stakes were high for her.”

While Smyth rep­re­sents a gen­er­a­tion of fem­i­nists who have been oppos­ing the Eighth Amend­ment ever since it was passed into law, the dual focus on Horan also speaks to a new­er cohort of young, often work­ing-class, women work­ing to effect change with­in their social and pro­fes­sion­al cir­cles. ​“Andrea want­ed to bring the cam­paign to peo­ple that fol­lowed her,” Kane explains, ​“to meet them where they were, as opposed to expect­ing them to come to where the activism was hap­pen­ing. She want­ed to find – and she did find – authen­tic ways of engag­ing with peo­ple to unleash their own power.”

In one of The 8^th’s most poignant scenes, Horan sits with col­leagues and friends in her salon as they exchange sto­ries of the harm the abor­tion ban has caused to them and their loved ones, the cam­era lin­ger­ing inti­mate­ly on clasped hands and Horan’s tear­ful face as she offers sup­port and sym­pa­thy. ​“She’s just this extra­or­di­nary char­ac­ter who illus­trates how to bring peo­ple into activism in a way that suits them,” Kennedy says.

The painful lega­cy of the Eighth Amend­ment is pal­pa­ble through­out, from the tes­ti­monies giv­en in Horan’s salon to the more wide­ly pub­li­cised con­tem­po­rary accounts that Kane, Kennedy and O’Boyle refer to. These vignettes revolve around spe­cif­ic his­toric cas­es that were for­ma­tive to Ireland’s cur­rent pro-choice move­ment, such as the remains of neglect­ed chil­dren being dis­cov­ered in Catholic moth­er-and-baby homes, or the trag­ic case of Savi­ta Halap­panavar, who died from sep­sis after being refused an abor­tion fol­low­ing an incom­plete miscarriage.

Their com­bined pres­ence in the film under­scores not only the cru­el­ty and vio­lence of the amendment’s restric­tions, but also the ways in which these restric­tions – and the pol­i­tics of health­care more broad­ly – inevitably dis­crim­i­nate across exist­ing fault lines of class and race. ​“If you think about it, the women who could afford to trav­el, trav­elled,” Kennedy says. ​“They went to the UK [where] they could get child­care for their oth­er chil­dren. They could take that time off work. They could get a plane tick­et. It’s women who are on the mar­gins of soci­ety finan­cial­ly, who it was a big­ger bur­den for.”

“Ini­tial­ly we want­ed to cov­er the last 100 years in Ire­land, but because the film is 90 min­utes long, we realised we would have more impact if we focused on the last 35,” O’Boyle adds. ​“With Savita’s sto­ry, for exam­ple, we incor­po­rat­ed a num­ber of oth­er med­ical cas­es around that sec­tion to show this isn’t just a one off – there are many, many women who have been in hor­ren­dous sce­nar­ios. We were try­ing to speak to that, so by the end of the film it becomes a cul­mi­na­tion of the ways in which women have been side­lined for such a long time in our society.”

By bring­ing togeth­er long-neglect­ed sto­ries of women’s suf­fer­ing over decades of state-inflict­ed vio­lence, The 8^th crafts a com­pelling, emo­tion­al­ly res­o­nant argu­ment for repro­duc­tive rights, align­ing itself in many ways with the activism it rep­re­sents. ​“We didn’t come to the film as activists,” Kane reflects, ​“we came to it as film­mak­ers, and ulti­mate­ly it’s a film about an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly suc­cess­ful grass­roots move­ment that won. We didn’t inten­tion­al­ly make this film to be an activist tool, but […] a lot of the reac­tion we’re get­ting in screen­ings… some­one said to us it fills an activist’s soul.”

“When you’re mak­ing a film, what you’re ide­al­ly try­ing to do is doc­u­ment what you’re see­ing and how things are chang­ing,” O’Boyle adds. ​“Ini­tial­ly this was about repro­duc­tive rights and abor­tion but as it con­tin­ued it [took on] this nar­ra­tive of care and com­pas­sion. There was this idea around what kind of soci­ety we want to be. Let’s look at our­selves in the mir­ror and say, ​‘Are we going to take responsibility?’”

Find out more at the8th​film​.com