Creating Legal Space for the Unborn

This article explores how the unborn moved from inhabiting an implicit mother-centric space, tacitly expressed in the Irish constitutional order, to a separate legal space created first by the Eighth Amendment and later through public discourse, judicial interpretation and failed constitutional referenda. The article opens with a brief examination of the relationship between law and space in recent scholarly works. It goes on to assess the impact of post-colonial and gender discourse in producing the first legal space in which the unborn was tacitly understood. This is followed by an exploration of how cultural and gender rhetoric gave birth to a definite legal space in which the right to life for the unborn was protected by the Constitution and the government’s subsequent attempts to solve the legal limbo by shifting the debate to the social policy space. The paper concludes by discussing the extent to which a wider, more universal space, that of human rights discourse, may have an impact on the legal space created for the unborn, by either protecting or weakening its right to life.