Ourselves alone.
Categoric failures mark two years (and many decades) of waiting for women in Northern Ireland.
Yesterday was the second anniversary of decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland. No services have been commissioned to date. Yesterday also saw Sinn Fein and the SDLP abstain on a medically ignorant private members’ bill that will force people who receive a severe fetal diagnosis at the 20 week scan into making a decision about that pregnancy within a four week window. Or run the gauntlet of travelling.
Going against all medical advice from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and our healthcare professionals on the ground, this act of cowardice from SF and the SDLP is a signal of the ongoing war on women that has dominated the island of Ireland and its history.
A lot of people have chastised activists like myself that abortion is merely a “single issue” and there are bigger, more important problems to worry about. To be clear: abortion is not a single issue. If you want to look at any political party, any economic or even geopolitical issue - abortion factors. For example, we see discussions about the commemorations of Northern Ireland and the lambasting of partition by Sinn Fein. But nowhere is it more clear than with the issue of abortion that Sinn Fein not only adhere to partitionism, but use it for their own gains. There is one approach for the north and another for the south. With the slew of young radical leftist men and women in the south rushing to join the party in their droves, as a northerner who lives under the yoke of SF, it must be categorically stated that this is not a party of liberation.
For the SDLP new depths of reptilian behaviours are personified with politicians hiding behind the veneer of “conscience” and taking no accountability whatsoever for this party’s contribution to the pain and suffering of women in the north. How much longer are we going to allow parties like the SDLP (and Alliance) to hide behind and deflect human rights issues on the basis of conscience? What makes Colin McGrath MLA’s opinion on abortion worthy of being heard and documented yet the conscience and experiences of the hundreds of women in the north who have abortions are swept aside and ignored?
When we elect political representatives because they are green or orange, we receive the same small-mindedness that creates these restrictive binaries. We get moral arbiters who haven’t bothered to do the research and are weak. How much longer will marginalised people in the north be steamrollered because of either fear of, or support of, an United Ireland? And what kind of United Ireland, what kind of Union do we have where basic human rights and dignity are thrown aside in as cavalier a manner as there can possibly be?
Political unionism is a less complex scenario than their nationalist counterparts. With the flick of a pen, both the UUP and DUP failed women again. Plus ça change. And yet we know members of these parties are in fact pro-choice. Cllr Ruth Patterson, former DUP and then Independent, is about as pro-choice as I am.
Party before principles - this is the refrain that unites them all.