Unfortunately the amendment tabled by Diane Abbott for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology legislation regards to extending abortion rights to the north of Ireland failed last year.
I remember chatting to a woman from Alliance for Choice at an abortion rights meeting last year in Parliament. She was over here, as part of a 40 woman team to support the amendment to extend the abortion rights to the north of Ireland. Forty being politically symbolic as 40 women each week leave the north to obtain an abortion elsewhere.
And that costs between £600 to £2,000. Access to abortion is very much a class issue and if you can’t get the money then a woman is pushed into a desperate situation that include backstreet abortions. Women also end up buying RU486 aka abortion pill over the web, taking pot luck as they don’t know what they are buying. Desperate circumstances bring desperate measures.
At the meeting a speaker from Family Planning Association NI spoke about the constant anti-abortion protesters outside clinics were screams of “murderer” is common and so is harassment. And yet during the past 40 years around 80,000 Irish women have travelled to obtain an abortion. It is not God’s law (or whatever the latest reactionary nonsense from Iris Robinson and the rest of the unholy alliance) but a woman’s right to control her own body. Where she does not have to travel abroad to fulfill that right. Where she isn’t judged, moralised, lectured, undermined and pressured by religious doctrine but her right to choose.
fpa’s Discrimination and Denial: Abortion Law in Northern Ireland is a short hard hitting film that exposes the realities women face when denied free safe legal abortion.
It has premiered in Belfast (http://www.fpa.org.uk/News/Press/Pressreleases2009/15June2009).
Please see as well Martin Salter’s EDM
From Abortion Rights http://www.abortionrights.org.uk/content/view/308/1/
