Bernadette McAliskey in conversation with Alliance for Choice Belfast
The indefatigable Bernadette McAliskey talking about bodily autonomy in front of a live audience with Alliance for Choice Belfast, in Queen's University Belfast, Thursday 20th October 2022.
Abortion Penpals 2022, “You are not alone!”
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10 out of 26 areas in Northern Ireland have no access to early medical abortion services. The Northern Trust is the largest geographical health trust in NI and is also the most recent to have ceased provision of clinic-based early medical abortion services. Women and pregnant people in this trust now face further barriers to access will have to travel to seek the legal abortion that they could have had at home.
The current situation in Northern Ireland sees early medical abortion services only available up to 10 weeks gestation (9 weeks 6 days) despite the law stating it should be available on request up to 12 weeks gestation and the World Health Organisation recommending 13 weeks. No commissioned services mean that there has been no information published by health trusts on how and when to access services leaving women and pregnant people in the dark when it comes to making healthcare decisions.
The World Health Organisation have recognised that abortion services are essential healthcare and have stated that “abortion provision in a global pandemic should minimise facility visits and provider-client contacts through the use of telemedicine and self-management approaches.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic the rest of the U.K. has seen improved access to abortion through telemedicine and pills-by-post services. Northern Ireland has yet again been left behind despite being the only part of the U.K. that has fully decriminalised abortion. This is due to the continued obstruction to access by the NI Executive including prominent anti-choice politicians.
Telemedicine is safe and effective and has proven to be a vital service, providing people with safety and reassurance during the ongoing pandemic. Telemedicine would allow a medical practitioner to have a consultation with the pregnant person either over the phone or online. If eligible they will be prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol which can be collected at a pharmacy, alongside instructions for how to take the medication and information on who to contact if additional support is needed.
The Department of Health has advised the public to stay at home, however, women and pregnant people are being forced to travel to a clinic to take a single pill, when they can take the further 4 pills at home 24 hours later. Travelling in a pandemic puts the pregnant person and health professionals at risk of contracting COVID-19.
Alliance for Choice believes that everyone should have the right to choose, this extends to deciding between clinic-based care and self-managed abortions. Self-managed approaches use the same safe medications that are prescribed in clinics by healthcare professionals. Mifepristone and misoprostol are effective up to 98% of the time and this approach is used by millions of people around the world to safely end pregnancies up to 13 weeks with no long-term effects.
Self-managed approaches will allow us to be our own service providers removing many of the barriers to services that we currently face. Care at home enables us to have more control over our own bodies so we can be supported in ending our pregnancies safely, effectively and privately at home. Alliance for Choice have provided self-managed abortion workshops to empower, educate and inform activists and others in Northern Ireland. These workshops outline where to access the safe and legal online pills, how to take them, what to expect and who to call if there are any complications or worries.
Over the next two weeks we will be sharing how telemedicine prevents and ameliorates the impacts of gender-based violence… please link, like and share across our website and social media platforms.
By Emma Gallen
Alliance for Choice organiser
Abortion rights and reading have long been my “hobbies”. Since lockdown and not going out to talk to strangers about abortion, I’ve been reading a lot. Abortion doesn’t appear as a plot point that often, but when it does it can completely change how I feel about a novel. None of the novels below are about abortion and I’m fixating on minor plot points really, but do be aware if you don’t want spoilers then please don’t read ahead. If you can think of more please get in touch. I won’t be going outside, so I can read!
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid is one of the best depictions of abortion in fiction. I would have enjoyed more of Camilla and Karen’s friendship overall but Camilla going with Karen for her abortion and supporting her when her partner won’t shows the need for female friendships. It showed the male entitlement: he wanted a baby, why would she deny him this? And it is one of the few novels that addresses that pregnancy is not just you get a bit bigger and then there’s a baby. Karen points out that it will impact her work: how can she be in a touring band while pregnant?
Abortion is a sin and leads to punishment in Discomfort of Evening. This is a Dutch novel and I think that changes the tone than say an Irish novel coming out with the same idea. The abortion is barely noticeable in this novel of a family dealing with grief following the death of their eldest son. The incest, peadophilia and animal abuse are much more prominent. That the mother feels she is being punished is derided by the child narrator. The word abortion never used but her mother’s religious beliefs are not to be trusted.
I read Oh My God What A Complete Aisling last year because it was 99p on Kindle and I thought it was a light read. It was not. I got one of the best depictions of living under the eighth amendment and why the Repeal campaign was so important. It looked at how long the fight was going on for, how the conversations in rural areas were so important and that the access involved more than just getting on a plane to England. It covered who it impacted, why it needed to change and showed various ways to campaign. The two authors were both vocal about getting the law changed and I think continue to support ARC as the fight isn’t yet over.
Another recent Irish novel with a abortion and the lack of it: Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies. The story is one of a large cast of characters and how their lives are all entwined. Travelling to England for an abortion is just one small sub plot but was just matter of fact.
Marian Keyes has a long history of Irish women “getting the boat”. Her novels are a great way to look at how abortion was treated in Ireland. Her 2018 novel The Break had every interview for its promotion talking about the abortion because of the year of release. But Keyes wasn’t just jumping on the bandwagon trying to make the novel relevant. There are lines in earlier books about women travelling, it’s plot points and character reveals.
Maggie O’Farrell deals with abortion regret with great nuance and subtlety inInstructions for a Heatwave. It uses the same language as Expectation (“my baby would be three”) but it doesn’t just leave her crying and then moving on. We go back to her as a person who doesn’t want children. We get that the abortion changed her relationship with her husband and her sister. The regret isn’t the abortion, it’s how it changed those relationships. O’Farrell is described as British-Irish and her characters in Instructions are second generation Irish in England. I think that the Irish and Northern Irish experience of abortion meant this was more sympathetic than Expectation.
I was so disappointed in Expectation. I can’t say if it is abortion regret or if it is reflection. Sometimes that sort of ambiguity is a strength in a novel and it’s good that we don’t know, but as we know the other two main characters' feelings about having a baby it felt like it was unclear. Maybe I’m being unfair and it is good literature because women don’t always have clear feelings about their abortions but when a novel has so much about pregnancy, yearning for pregnancy, a shot gun wedding for a pregnant character; the feelings on abortion should either be clearer or written better. I thought this was an English novel for an English audience and when I look at how abortion is presented through that lens it angers me less. That it was an option to be accessed readily and easily. To not require more than a couple of sentences. To be a throwaway line.
Abortion in Irish literature has almost become a tick box for a modern novel. Sally Rooney discusses the Eighth Amendment in both Conversations with Friends and Normal People. In neither novel is it a pivotal plot point but is to give insight into the characters minds and politics. Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times is much the same: her abortion fund pays for her to move to Hong Kong. Thankfully the character did not have a crisis pregnancy as an abortion in Hong Kong costs a lot.
As I stare at my bookshelves I see many memoirs where people talk about abortion as a relief. I see American novels that talk about supporting Planned Parenthood without a crisis pregnancy in the story. I look forward to the days when abortion in Ireland is a thing for historical fiction. I can’t wait for abortion to be so normal in Northern Ireland that I don’t fixate on two lines in a novel. But until then, I will keep complaining and keep campaigning.
I grew up in the suburbs of London but was lucky enough to continue my studies across the pond at Trinity College Dublin. I remember in one of our first lectures - a very lofty "European Thought" class - our lecturer asked us who in the room would consider themselves a feminist. I looked around the room, my arms firmly plastered to my side, wondering who on earth would want to associate themselves with those bra-burning radicals - they certainly won't be getting college boyfriends.
I look back on that moment with a profound sense of disappointment now. Why did I think all the work was done? That because we had voting rights, could go to university, had great job opportunities ahead and could wear what we wanted to - that there was no need for feminism? This was certainly partly my own fault (not probing these points further to reveal their flimsy realities) and a result of my own privilege - coming from a liberal, middle-class family, and attending an a single sex private school - I never really saw how bad it was for us girls back then.
Fast forward a few years, and I'm in Moscow on my year abroad reporting on domestic violence abuses in Russia and the complete lack of legislation on the matter. I'm eventually told by my editor that even though the paper was liberal, we just can't publish things that are that grim and we don't know who we might make angry. Well, I’m angry now and the following year, I return to Trinity and turn that anger into my thesis - an analysis of women's rights to bodily autonomy in post-Soviet Russia and Poland (another European nation with grossly restrictive abortion laws).
It was also in this year - 2016 - that I finally took to the streets for the "March for Choice" - and I'm shocked by the stories I hear. I knew abortion restrictions in the Republic of Ireland were bad, but I hadn't interacted with the reality of the situation until that very day. Again, I'm angry. I turn up to more of these events, and vent all over social media.
Then finally, two years after leaving Dublin in May 2018, the repeal the 8th amendment is passed, voted for by an overwhelming majority. Finally - abortion rights for all women in the UK and Ireland!
WRONG. I discover quickly that women in Northern Ireland are still bound by archaic laws that date back to 1861. WHO LET THIS HAPPEN?! I'm angry again, but I'm 24 and I get swept up by the rat race, I'm trying to pursue a career as a musician and as a broadcast journalist (yes, my back-up career is just as poorly paid as the dream career) - and I don't really do anything for a long time.
I read things, I share things online, but I don't do.
Two months ago, I finally decided it was time. I was conflicted during the Repeal the 8th campaign and felt that it wasn't my battle to fight, and I didn't want to ride off the coattails of my Dublin pals who were doing the real groundwork while I admired from afar in London - but Northern Ireland is different. For better or worse, it is currently part of the UK - and surely one benefit of that should be the adoption of the rest of the UK's policy on abortion. But it isn’t, and this is outrageous and unfair and it boils my blood every time I remember.
Of course, I am delighted to see that in Stormont's absence, the UK parliament has very recently decriminalised abortion in Northern Ireland - and that this will go through by October 21st (pending Stormont power collapse remains), but there is so much work left to do - and many women in Northern Ireland seeking abortions will be subject to even more virulent abuse as they try to access their rights by prolife groups and individuals who do not wish decriminalisation to take place.
On top of this, it's also important to note that women in Malta and Gibraltar face similar draconian restrictions to the women of Northern Ireland - and no-one's talking about them either which this is why money will also be raised for the Abortion Support Network who also help women here.
We can't continue to ignore this blatant abuse of human rights when it is right on our doorstep anymore. We can't continue to police women's bodies and treat them as second-class citizens, as subhuman, as not deserving of their bodily autonomy. To have the body of a woman even with these rights is often enough of a burden to bear. Abortion restrictions target women most in need and abortions will happen whether they are legal and accessible or not. Those who can afford to will endure the emotional trauma of travelling abroad, and those who cannot, will access whatever illegal and unsafe methods are available to them. This is a class issue too.
Tickets are available through Billetto (https://billetto.co.uk/e/now-for-tonight-tickets-371740) - and if you're a musician who wants to join the jam but money is tight, we can try and sort you out with a sponsored ticket so get in touch via: paigebeamusic@gmail.com for that!
Tickets are £10 online, and £12 on the door - and there will be Alliance for Choice merch on sale for £2 a piece so bring your coins too!
https://www.facebook.com/events/497539244337198/
See you there x
YES! The ringing, resounding, confirming, affirming, positive joy of a yes. “Yes” to a new beginning in Ireland’s relationship with its women and pregnant people. “Yes” to compassion and care and change. “Yes” to the truth of every abortion story and its individual worth. “Yes” to never letting one more woman die because you will no longer say, “This is a Catholic Country”.
Alliance for Choice has some opportunities for activists in December 2017.
As well as our weekly city centre stall, we need around 20 volunteers to help with a travelling pop-up exhibition called “My Body My Life” which will be installed in the University of Ulster’s Unique Art and Design shop in Belfast from 5th to the 10th of December.