Calling Stormont: decriminalise abortion

Tell your MLA that women who have abortions are not criminals.

Alliance for Choice, an organisation that campaigns for the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland, expressed its dismayed at the recent decision to hand a suspended prison sentence to a young woman in Northern Ireland who could not afford to travel to England for an abortion, so bought pills on the internet.

As things stand, the 1967 Abortion Act does not apply to Northern Ireland and there is no provision in Northern Ireland for abortions to be legally carried out on grounds of rape, incest or foetal abnormality.

Abortion is legal in Northern Ireland (NI), but the circumstances are extremely restrictive and rely on the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. And women found in direct contravention of that Act can be put to ‘penal servitude for life’.

But women in NI are having abortions – at least 80,000 since 1968.

Women with the means to do so have to travel to England and other European countries for safe and legal abortion services.

These women have to pay privately for a service that is available on the NHS to their counterparts elsewhere in UK; and abortion costs range from £600 to £2,000.

Alliance for Choice’s #trustwomen campaign is keeping abortion firmly on the political agenda in the run up to the Assembly Elections on 5 May 2016, and pushing for progress on abortion legislation in Northern Ireland.

The campaigners hold that women should be trusted to know what is best for themselves and their families.

The #trustwomen campaign is to encourage Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) to:

Trust women to make decisions about their own lives;

Ask for legal change to allow greater access to abortion; and

Make the vote a free vote for all MLAs, should progressive changes come to the Assembly.

And it is urging all supporters to contact their MLAs and prospective candidates and tell them that women are not to be criminalised.

Alliance for Choice is asking for MLAs to have a free vote on the matter to ensure that the primary concerns of the NI Assembly in regards to abortion are women’s health and women’s lives.

The use of a – strong – party whip has so far prevented MLAs from voting according to their personal consciences on abortion rights, and affects women’s lives in a real and damaging way.

But public opinion poll after opinion poll have highlighted that over 70 per cent of the population want abortion law reform – which is more support than was demonstrated for the Good Friday Agreement.

Alliance for Choice believes that the decriminalisation of abortion should be considered by parties in the same way that the vote on Equal Marriage was.

Ask Alliance for Choice for postcards for your friends, family and networks to send to your MLA, or you can email your Stormont candidates this message.

And please sign this petition.

Thanks.

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