Workers Solidarity Movement

Three women have just (23rd May) handed themselves into the Strand Road Police Station in Derry admitting to breaking the anti-choice abortion law. They will either admit to providing the abortion pill or taking it themselves.

We have openly and defiantly broken their law and they have ignored this, these three brave women have decided to force their hand.

People handing themselves in highlights the unworkability of the law. It lays bare the hypocrisy of the government and pressures the state to scrap it, making it clear that if the police wish to criminalise one woman for a crime that so many of us have committed then there can be no exception to the law, we must be arrested as well. Prisons would be filled to the brim if the law was actually enforced..

Recently a 21-year-old woman from County Down was facing life imprisonment for having an abortion induced by pills ordered on the internet. This is despite abortion being legal in the rest of the UK since 1967. However she was ultimately given a suspended sentence, a decision likely influenced by similar direct actions over the past few years involving hundreds of people (mostly women) signing letters admitting to having or facilitating illegal abortions. This further confirms the necessity and effectiveness of direct action in the struggle for abortion rights.

Until the law allows for a free and legal abortion you can have a safe abortion through the use of pills. If you are in need of an abortion please visit womenhelp.org, womenonweb.org or abortionsupport.org.uk. If you can afford to please consider donating to the Abortion Support Network as well.

Here is the video of the Derry 3 walking into the Strand Police Station in Derry in order to directly challenge the abortion law and force the state's hand (raising their fists in defiance before entering).