Medical
tourism in Ireland,
like many Western states, is built around assumptions about individual agency,
choice, possibility and mobility. However one specific form of medical tourism
- the flow of women from Ireland
travelling in order to secure an abortion¿ disrupt and contradict these
assumptions. One legacy of the contentious and bitter political and legal
battles surrounding abortion in Ireland
in the 1980s and 1990s has been the securing the right of mobility for all
pregnant Irish citizens to cross international borders to secure an abortion.
However these mobility rights are contingent upon nationality, social class and
race and have enabled the successive Irish governments to avoid their
responsibilities to provide safe, legal and affordable abortion services in Ireland.
Nearly twenty years after the X case the pregnant female body moving over
international borders ¿ entering and leaving the state - is still interpreted as problematic and
threatening to the Irish state.