We are the invisible victims of the DUP’s anti-abortion hardliners

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/19/invisible-victims-dup-anti-abortion-womens-rights-northern-ireland

Version 0 of 5.

Five years ago a 15-year-old girl travelled from Northern Ireland to Manchester with her mother to have an abortion in a private clinic. The procedure plus travel and accommodation cost them about £900. They were UK citizens. Had they been resident elsewhere in the UK, a termination would have been free on the NHS. But they were from Northern Ireland and this is the price – psychological, medical, physical and literal – that women in Northern Ireland pay for living here.

Amid the outrage about what a British government propped up by the Democratic Unionist party would mean for the rights of women in Britain, and for lesbian, gay and transgender communities, the experiences of those groups in Northern Ireland have been all but invisible. When it comes to issues relating to sex, sexuality and women’s bodies, Northern Ireland is a remnant of the 1950s. The laws created and upheld by the devolved government force people there to live as second-class citizens. And yet people in other parts of the UK seem to assume that we suffer this oppression because we choose to.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the lack of access to abortion. Northern Ireland has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, and is the only part of the UK that does not allow abortion except in the narrowest of circumstances – and not including in cases of rape, incest or fatal foetal abnormality.

Many have demanded assurances that the involvement of the DUP – a party that fought to halt an extension of abortion rights to Northern Ireland – will not mean a deterioration in the rights of women elsewhere in the UK. But I have heard few commentators or politicians demand those same rights for women or LGBT communities here.

Outside a few, mainly grassroots activist groups who have stood in solidarity with campaigners in Northern Ireland for many years, the prevailing attitude is one of stopping the dreaded tide advancing on Britain from the dark shores of Northern Ireland. Those of us already caught in its grip are but flotsam, inconvenient but ultimately discardable.

This is not a matter of benign neglect but malign policy. The mother and daughter mentioned above brought a case against the UK government, alleging discrimination. The health secretary has a policy of not funding medical services in England and Wales that would be unlawful in Northern Ireland. While he accepted during the court case that it was within his power to change this, he has refused to do so.

Earlier this year the mother and daughter lost in the supreme court by three to two. Lord Wilson, delivering the ruling, said it was not for the court to “address the ethical considerations which underlie the differences”, and that the government was entitled to restrict access to abortions on the NHS in line with local democratic decision-making around abortion. These “local democratic decisions” have been heavily influenced by the DUP’s brand of religious conservatism. And yet it is the responsibility of the UK government to ensure that the laws in all its territories comply with international human rights law. Several international human rights bodies and the Northern Ireland high court have found that Northern Ireland’s abortion laws breach human rights. Devolution does not relieve the UK government of its responsibility to the citizens of Northern Ireland.

Because it is such a long time since abortion was legalised in the UK, it is difficult to grasp quite what this means for us here. Another mother of a 15-year-old girl is currently being prosecuted for helping her daughter access safe but illegal abortion pills over the internet. A different young woman was prosecuted after her room-mates said they found the remains of an aborted foetus in a rubbish bin. A pro-choice activist, accused of procuring illegal abortion pills on the internet, had her workshop raided on International Women’s Day (the police did not find any pills). This is what happens when desperate women and girls are unable to access abortion where they live and lack the money to travel (though more than 700 of them do travel each year to England and Wales for an abortion).

Failing to acknowledge that women are already being hurt by the DUP is at best disingenuous and at worst hypocritical. Any fight to protect these rights in England, Scotland and Wales under a Tory-DUP UK government must also be a fight to extend them to Northern Ireland.