Diane Supports Northern Ireland Women

06 Oct 2008

Forty women from Northern Ireland are to descend on Westminster this Wednesday 8th October to lobby MPs to support abortion rights in N. Ireland. The 40 represent the 40 women who leave NI every week to obtain abortions in Britain and, increasingly, Holland and Belgium. The 40 will also point up the fact that women in NI are 40 years behind women in the rest of the UK in terms of the right to control their fertility and access abortion when they need it.

The women are all members of Alliance for Choice which describes itself as "an organisation of women and men, Protestant and Catholic, who campaign within NI for the extension of the 1967 Act to NI".  Among the 40 will be Dawn Purvis, Member of the NI Assembly for East Belfast. They will be met at the Houses of Parliament by supporter Baroness May Blood of the Shankill.

The NI women will meet with Diane Abbot who has tabled an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill calling for the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. Alliance for Choice spokesperson, Goretti Horgan, says that the women want to meet as many MPs as possible in order to counter some of the anti-abortion propaganda which is doing the rounds in Westminster.

For example, she says, MPs are being told by the government that they should not adopt an 'imperialist' or 'colonialist' attitude to NI and impose something on the region. "But there is no question of Westminster 'imposing' abortion on NI; it is already a reality of life here.  Each year thousands of Northern Irish women travel to Britain and Europe and pay for private abortions.  For women living on low incomes, getting the money together on time is impossible. An unwanted pregnancy can leave some women in a desperate situation – which is why we now find some women turning to the internet to buy the abortion pill." 

"The poverty of some women in NI also impacts on the numbers of late abortions in Britain. The time it takes some women to find enough money to have an abortion means that women from here are three times more likely than British women to have abortions after 20 weeks.  However, thousands of others are forced to continue pregnancies they find intolerable. This includes women pregnant as a result of rape and sexual abuse", says the Alliance for Choice spokesperson.  NI's GPs are explicitly prohibited from referring women for NHS abortions in Britain.

The 40 women will be telling MPs that "saying leave abortion to the NI Assembly is like saying leave it to the Taliban to sort out women's rights". They point to the fact that Iris Robinson MP, chair of the Assembly Health Committee, recently said that it was the duty of the Assembly "to implement god's law". 

There will be two photo opportunities during the visit: the first at 10.30a.m. outside the Houses of Parliament (in front of Big Ben) with Diane Abbott MP and the second at Downing Street at mid-day when the women will hand into Number Ten a letter signed by the leaders of civil society in NI supporting abortion rights for women in the region.

Women's Aid Federation in Northern Ireland Director, Annie Campbell, will be speaking on behalf of Alliance for Choice at an Abortion Rights public meeting and briefing for MPs in the House of Commons on the evening of Tues 7th Oct.

Ends

For further information, comment etc contact Goretti Horgan on 07973528772 or Annie Campbell on 07748345308



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