Ní Saoirse go Saoirse na mBan - The North Is Next
Last Friday in the Twenty Six Counties, women’s rights triumphed, the unstoppable march of social progress triumphed over the old conservative State many have suffered under. The religious right and the far-right crumbled under the pressure of the will of the people. They and their poisonous ideas have been dealt a blow from which it will be impossible to recover.
But while women in the Twenty Six Counties have won those rights denied to them for so long, women in the Six Counties still suffer under the archaic laws that have now been banished just a stones throw away in this state.
These women, 724 of them as of 2016, are still forced to travel across the water to get what should be a routine medical procedure. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), abortions are one of the worlds most safest and common medical procedures. They recommend that abortion be made both legal and safe, prohibition results in the deaths of over 47,000 women annually, mostly in previously colonised countries.
But while some may argue that it will be easier now to get the train to Dublin, rather than flying to London, or getting the ferry to Glasgow; this doesn’t change the fact that women in the north of our country are still denied the very basic human right of bodily autonomy.
But as long as Arlene Foster’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), with the support of certain elements of Sinn Féin are in favour of the retention of these laws, and stand together in opposition to the extension of the British Abortion Act 1967 to the North, these backward laws will remain.
Unionism, and in particular the DUP, pride themselves on their ‘Britishness’ and their cherished connection to the ‘mainland’; they have for years steadfastly opposed progressive social legislation that has been the norm in Britain for decades, and until very recently in this State, progressive laws such as marriage equality and abortion rights. Ironic considering they class themselves as a part of Britain, yet disregard British laws, while seeking for themselves ‘special’ conditions with regard to socially progressive legislation.
It is unacceptable that a portion of the women of this island are afforded less rights than their fellow countrywomen. While women in this state have suffered with the threat of a fourteen year prison sentence for obtaining an abortion or abortion pills, which now thankfully will be ended; women in the North still face the threat of imprisonment, as exemplified by recent court cases, for daring to exercise their human right to bodily autonomy.
Éirígí stands in solidarity with our sisters in the North, and we demand as a right access to FREE, SAFE and LEGAL abortion services to anybody who needs it; and pending the reunification of our island, we demand the extension of the British 1967 Abortion Act to the North. All-Ireland Abortion Rights Now!