Time for a grown-up abortion debate
Pro-choice and pro-life campaigners have been ramping up their campaigns lately. But there’s no use in Ireland burying its collective head in the sand any longer. With women continuing to travel abroad for terminations, the time has come for the status quo to be challenged.
Adrienne Murphy, 05 Oct 2012
In relation to all of which, I can only say: draw your own conclusions…
Contact Women on Web at womenonweb.org.pervasiveness of abortion amongst women living in Ireland. This silence, which is imposed and policed by the legal, medical and religious establishment, allows the anti-choice brigade to keep peddling their misogynistic propaganda and myths about abortion, as we’ve seen with the recent Youth Defence billboard campaign. Well, the time has come to change that…
setting women free
The anti-choice gang have not always had it entirely their own way. For decades, feminist women and men, both inside and outside of Ireland, have put up a strong resistance to this country’s anti-choice regime. They have campaigned and lobbied for full reproductive rights, which are the sine qua non of equality for women.
These men and women form an underground solidarity network, both open and clandestine, that helps women living in Ireland to access safe abortions. In the past few weeks I’ve had the honour of conversing with some of these activists. The more I speak to them, the greater my conviction that they are heroes of the resistance to anti-choice triumphalism, as indeed are the thousands of women living in Ireland who have managed, and still manage, against all the odds, to exercise freedom of choice over what happens to their own bodies.
Today, as every day, at least 12 women from Ireland will have surgical abortions in the UK. The majority of these women are already mothers, who, for a wide variety of reasons, realise that they cannot support another child. Other women in this large and amorphous group need an abortion to save their own lives. Some of the rest may be carrying foetuses that have no hope of survival beyond the womb; others may be victims of rape or incest. Others again want the freedom to choose when and whether to become a mother. They may have been on the most potent contraceptive cocktail possible and still have become pregnant.
But theirs is only half the story.
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Adrienne Murphy
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