'Full Frontal' Producer Describes What It Was Like to Witness Ireland's Historic Abortion Referendum Firsthand
When producer and correspondent Allana Harkin pitched her latest segment idea to the team at Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, she says eyebrows were raised.
“Everyone’s looking at me like, ‘Allana, where’s the fun part,'” Harkin told Glamour. The pitch? To cover Ireland’s historic abortion referendum. “All I did was throw up my hands, like, ‘It’s Ireland, everything will be funny.'”
In the end, Harkin traveled to Ireland to film the segment, which airs Wednesday night, just before the May 26 vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment, an amendment voted into the constitution in 1983 which banned abortion. Irish citizens, many of whom traveled to Ireland for the vote, ultimately passed the repeal, signaling a historic change for women’s reproductive rights in the country.
While the change was celebrated by many, Harkin says she found the mood to be more solemn in Ireland.
“Everyone we spoke to said, ‘Nobody’s saying they want an abortion.’ It’s more about a woman’s right to choose and a woman’s body and her health,” Harkin told Glamour. “It wasn’t like an in-your-face kind of celebration.”
That’s reflected in this exclusive Full Frontal clip for Glamour, which shows Harkin speaking to a voter about the gravity of the amendment.
“This oppression of women is absolutely normalized here,” Karen Twomey, Founder of Global Repeal Network tells Harkin in the clip. “We are kind of addicted to oppression in this country.”
“This story was a more personal one for me, simply because of my connection to the country,” says Harkin, whose parents were born in Ireland. “I’m looking at the situation in Ireland from a woman’s point of view—this is something that affects my life and affects my daughters’ lives. And I want them to live in a world where they receive really positive messages.”
But this is comedy, after all.
“We’re punctuating the news story with some really great jokes,” says Harkin. “We’re not journalists at all, but our job is to sort of turn the story on its head and find a new way into it.”
Full Frontal airs on Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. ET on TBS.
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