imageSixteen reasons to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. Now.

“Silence was a natural modus operandi for most women in Northern Ireland.

Speaking out didn’t just endanger your life and your situation, it endangered any of your close friends and your family. So there is a learned silence, and the silence is learned from violence.

I can’t think of many more violent things, apart from being actually killed, than to forcibly be made to give birth or be pregnant.

But that’s what women do in a traditional society and that’s the kind of silence that we are having to deal with.” – Emma Campbell, Alliance for Choice NI.

The quote above is the first of 16 transcribed from a radio show entitled ‘Struggling with Silence: Stories of Abortion Support and Alliance’ produced with Alliance for Choice Northern Ireland for 2013 Derry-Londonderry City of Culture.

The project aimed to highlight the many forms of gender violence committed by withholding access to safe and legal abortion in Northern Ireland.

On 5 December the BBC reported that Northern Ireland’s justice minister David Ford said he is going to consult on changing abortion laws to allow women carrying babies with fatal foetal abnormalities to have a termination.

Fatal foetal abnormality is currently not a ground for abortion under Northern Ireland law.

Other grounds, such as abortion in rape or incest cases, are also expected to be looked into.

As things stand, in Northern Ireland terminations are only permitted to save a woman’s life, or if there is a risk of permanent and serious damage to her mental or physical health.

But more than 1,000 women a year who do not fit in these categories travel from Northern Ireland each year to have an abortion in other parts of the UK.

Alliance for Choice NI is campaigning for the extension of  ‘mainland’ UK’s 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland.

It also supports the fight for abortion rights all over Ireland.

One quote has been shared every day since 25 November to coincide with this year’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign.

They illustrate the many reasons to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland.

To stop the silence.

To address inequality: When you make abortion against the law, you don’t stop it. You just make it so that women with money have options and women without have babies or do really really desperate things.

To provide support: The trauma and upset that a lot of contemporaries go through in Northern Ireland is not because it is an abortion, it is because the State has made it so difficult to access them.

To improve response: As soon as the word got out there was a ‘right to choose’ group here, immediately, and I mean within weeks there were people contacting us looking for help to get abortions.

To be understanding: It isn’t reasonable to ask a woman to travel abroad with an unviable foetus of a wanted baby. It isn’t fair to send someone who has the need for an abortion for any reason over to another country because we can’t palate it in our religious stomachs.

To uphold civil rights: ‘Time and time again attempts have been made to extend the Abortion Act to Northern Ireland but unfortunately women’s bodies have been used as political pawns in Britain’.

To speak more openly: we had to develop a word called Imelda which stood for abortion.

To care for everyone: It’s as basic as it could be your daughter, it could be your sister or it could be your aunt.

To ask Whose shame? Women are forced to feel ashamed and forced to feel like no matter what their reason for their decision is for, that they have to do it secretly, they have to do it illegally, they have to go to another country. All of these are not very subtle messages that the State doesn’t care for them.

To offer alternatives: So many people that contact us say they were pro-life ‘until’ – ‘until’ my wife got cancer, ‘until’ my teenage daughter got raped, ‘until’ my partner lost his job, ‘until’ I found that the baby wouldn’t survive until a week after birth, ‘until’ we found my existing child had autism, ‘until’ I found out that we had a gene that is passed through boys, ‘until’ I found out that I was against abortion until I needed an abortion.

To respect decisions: For women living in one of the poorest areas in Europe, the struggle was just how do you feed your kids, how do you keep your house? For people whose partners ended up in the services or in prison or in hiding or in communities that were fractured and internally torn, there were hierarchies of ‘deservedness’. Ultimately we need women to feel like its ok to have an abortion.

To heed all the calls: We’ve had calls from women as old as 47 and girls as young as 13. We’ve heard from fathers and mothers and daughters and aunts and friends and brothers and cousins and all sorts of different people calling on behalf of women who need abortions.

To examine priorities: When Savitha died there was a great outpouring of collective frustration from how people felt at being treated so badly by their own country. If it’s a competition between a woman and a foetus, a foetus will win in Ireland.

To discard stigma: Every single person has a story about abortion in Northern Ireland. Every. Single. Person. Obviously not all of them are positive but certainly not all of them are negative. They are just all secret.

To hear about choices: Many times when I have spoken to people they would say ‘Yeah it should be a choice, shouldn’t it.’

In 2009, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, recommended that the Northern Ireland Assembly “amend the abortion law to bring it in line with the 1967 Abortion Act with a view to preventing clandestine and unsafe abortions in cases of rape, incest or foetal abnormality.”

Alliance for Choice is calling on the Northern Ireland Assembly to hear the UN, medical professionals and, most importantly, the Northern Irish public and review the current abortion laws, extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland, and end the practice of forcing individuals to continue with unwanted pregnancies, travelling unsupported to access abortion services in England, and using illegal abortion pills or other illegal – read unsafe – methods.

Please sign the petition.

To hear why your support is important, listen to the podcast here.

To participate, you can share and comment on daily posts from Alliance for Choice Belfast’s facebook page  as well as @alliance4choice and @NIextend1967 on Twitter.

To stay updated on abortion access in Northern Ireland, check out Alliance for Choice’s Belfast site  or the NI site.

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