It’s a bugger when your flight is cancelled. It’s worse, I imagine, if you’re having to travel to another country to have an abortion. Time and money matter. When I saw that the recent snow had grounded flights from Ireland I immediately thought of this. Maybe I have never forgotten the time I sat next to an anxious young woman on a flight from Dublin who began to tell me why she was coming to London but couldn’t finish her sentences. She was just so alone that I wanted to go to the clinic with her. In the old days I remember seeing such women on the ferries.
Irish women have abortions, you see – they just don’t have them in their own country. Currently about nine women a day travel to the UK for terminations. Irish society knows of this export of hypocrisy, yet it continues to export its responsibility for human rights. Women pay the price.
But things are changing finally and many men are coming out in support of repealing the abortion ban in the Irish constitution in a forthcoming referendum, the terms of which are to be published on Thursday. A tweet from @Ladsforchoice brought it home: “Plenty of firewood chopped for this snowy weather. Thinking of all those who have had travel plans cancelled. We need health services in this country now.” Men are finally talking of their own experiences travelling with girlfriends to Britain, of seeing their sisters in trouble, of feeling helpless. Such men want to counter male voter apathy on this issue in the coming referendum. Ireland, we hardly know ye.
The so-called Repeal the 8th movement, referring to the clause that enshrines the ban, has brought together the generations as well as forging new relationships between young Irish and young British women in ways that gladden my heart. This runs absolutely counter to the ignorance and indifference that many in the UK, barely able to see Ireland as its own country, have shown towards it in the Brexit debate.
Source:
theguardian
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