Abortion rights in Ireland, north and south of the border | Letters

Readers respond to Suzanne Moore’s piece about the ongoing fight for the right to legal abortion

Irish women have been travelling to Britain for abortions for decades. In 1975, when I was a young English woman working as a union officer in Dublin, a desperate male friend asked how his wife’s 15-year-old sister could get an abortion (We must never stop fighting for the right to legal abortion, 8 March). Without knowledge of or access to contraception, her first sexual foray had left her pregnant. As a Brit, it was assumed I knew how to use my own country’s still new abortion law.

I scrabbled to find information about the Liverpool clinic; girl and mother took the boat and the deed was done. Anxious to prevent a repeat, the clinic provided a priest to reassure the girl she wasn’t eternally damned, plus contraceptive advice and a supply of pills, which she hid in her knicker drawer. Her mother found the pills and threw them away. Fifteen months on, the girl was pregnant again – and married.

Continue reading... March 09, 2018 at 12:01AM