THIS weekend marks one year since an incredible win for reproductive rights – a win that once seemed like an impossible hope – when Ireland voted to repeal the 8th Amendment to its constitution.
An amendment that had effectively prohibited abortion in virtually all but exceptional circumstances for 35 years. By voting to repeal this amendment – “Provision may be made by law for the regulation of termination of pregnancy” – a landslide majority of people returned autonomy over their bodies to more than two million women in Ireland.
However, 12 months on, one million women in Northern Ireland remain isolated – living in the only part of the UK and Ireland without access to basic healthcare. This is why Amnesty International is campaigning to redress the inequality with our It’s Time campaign, with a clear message that the time for Northern Ireland is now.
During the Ireland referendum campaign, I devoted many hours knocking on doors and leafleting houses alongside so many others in Northern Ireland for freedom, equality and to show our solidarity with the tireless campaigners over the border who won this historic victory for reproductive rights. And while we campaigned for reform in the South, we kept the hope alive that we would be next.
In this spirit, as we celebrate the anniversary of the vote to repeal the 8th Amendment this weekend, “Now For Northern Ireland” projections are lighting up buildings and statues across London, Belfast and Dublin and Glasgow to shine a spotlight on the injustice of Northern Ireland’s strict near-total abortion ban. The projected artwork – a giant heart– I designed to draw attention to the fact that women in Northern Ireland are still unable to access abortion and face restrictions more severe than most abortion laws currently being proposed and causing outrage across US states.
In Glasgow, we chose the Mary Barbour statue in Govan to stage the projection because not only was Barbour a champion of housing and equality in Scotland, she was also a women’s health pioneer. From 1925, Mary Barbour was chairman of the Glasgow Women’s Welfare and Advisory Clinic. She spoke at the opening, in August 1926, of the clinic in a storefront at 51 Govan Road, which was the first site offering advice on birth control in Scotland.
Last week, a ruling published in Edinburgh’s Court of Session rejected the appeal to a failed legal challenge to the Scottish Government’s decision to allow women to take abortion pills at home. Although this was a positive verdict, it exposes the potential problems with a legal framework that criminalises abortion as it does in Britain – and to an extreme extent in Northern Ireland where a woman is still living under the threat of imprisonment for obtaining abortion pills for her daughter, pills that are prescribed on the NHS in Scotland, England and Wales.
Health care professionals should be enabled to deliver the best medical care available for their patients without the threat of being taken to court. None of these legal actions would be happening if abortion was taken out of criminal law and situated squarely within the remit of sexual and reproductive healthcare rights. This is a matter for women and their doctors, not the police or judiciary.
The Amnesty projections are a stunt with a serious intent – to shine a spotlight on the unjustifiable neglect of people in Northern Ireland and draw attention to the UK Government’s inaction on reforming Northern Ireland’s abortion law, which remains one of the most restrictive in the world and carries the harshest criminal penalties in Europe.
It’s time for the UK Government to end the harm and hurt caused by our inhumane and discriminatory near-total abortion ban.
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