How to Win the Abortion Argument (Atlantic article)

[SoonerPride]

This is a long article.

I wonder how women feel about these words of advice using Ireland as an example of how to win the long war and secure abortion access nationwide.

It seems possible, but doesn't account for how evil the religious right is in America.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/feminist-activism-roe-abortion-debate/629769/?utm_source=apple_news

In May 2016, three women walked into a police station in Derry, Northern Ireland, and gave themselves up. They were unlikely criminals—all born in the 1940s, they arrived wearing warm coats and jeans. But Colette Devlin, Diana King, and Kitty O’Kane were deadly serious about their willingness to spend years in prison. Their offense: These three women had bought abortion pills on the internet.

I wrote about Devlin, King, and O’Kane in my history of feminism, Difficult Women, because they represented a type of unshowy grassroots activism that I find humbling and that will become ever more important in a post-Roe America. If anything close to Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion becomes an official Supreme Court ruling this summer, the effect on reproductive freedom will be immediate. Nine states have pre-Roe laws, currently unenforced, to ban all or nearly all abortion; 13 more have post-Roe bans that would be activated by the decision, according to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

When I went to meet the Derry activists, in 2018, Northern Ireland had a near-total ban on abortion, too. Although it is part of the United Kingdom, whose 1967 Abortion Act legalized terminations under certain conditions, Northern Ireland had been granted an exemption. Amid decades of conflict between Catholics and Protestants, leaders of the two religious factions could agree on one thing: They were opposed to a woman’s right to choose. The law in Northern Ireland made no exceptions for rape, incest, or fatal fetal abnormalities.

As always happens with abortion bans, people with resources found a way around the law. Anyone with money traveled across the sea to England, usually Manchester or Liverpool. Others bought pills on the internet. But Devlin, King, and O’Kane had heard about a teenager who’d used the pills and was reported to the police by her housemates. The three abortion-rights advocates believed that her conviction was an abomination—and they gambled that the police would stop pursuing such cases if their actions were subjected to public scrutiny. So they bought the same pills, went to a police station, and confessed everything. They dared the state to lock them up. Perhaps, King told me later, prison would give her a chance to catch up on her reading.

there is a lot more at the link.

[niyad]

1. and the WAR ON WOMEN continues apace. Would you consider cross-posting this in

women's Rights And Issuex? Thanks in advance.

Bookmarking for later.

[Wounded Bear]

2. K & R...nt

[FBaggins]

3. Isn't abortion illegal in Ireland after 12 weeks (with a couple of exceptions)?

I'm not sure most here would consider that "winning the abortion argument".

[SoonerPride]

4. Absolutism is addressed in the piece.

Accepting some limits, unpalatable as that is, is still better than an outright ban.

A total abortion ban means forcing women to give birth. Sometimes that will mean forcing a woman to carry a baby for 40 weeks who won’t live beyond his or her first breath. “To endure the full-term pregnancy, and to come home empty-handed and with the physical changes that come with pregnancy—it would have been awful,” the Irish writer Helen Serafinowicz said in an interview around the Irish referendum. She was living in England when she discovered that her 11-week fetus had a fatal skull condition in 2004, and had a termination; in Ireland, she would have had to continue the pregnancy: “I don’t know how I would have got through that, mentally or physically.” Barack Obama referenced the same situation in his statement on the Roe draft, asking voters to consider “the couple that have tried to have children for years, who are without any options when faced with the tragic reality of an unviable pregnancy.”

Stories such as that of Savita Halappanavar are also powerful. She died to preserve the life of a baby who would never have survived; the 31-year-old mother-to-be was deprived of her future by a law that ostensibly defended the right to life.

[Solly Mack]

5. I read the article.

Thank you for posting it.

[MuseRider]

6. Bookmarked

thank you!

[markie]

7. K&R n/t

[mopinko]

8. excellent article which begs the question- what about a referendum?

put it on the ballot in some of these neanderthal states. it would be interesting.