Up to 30 women and pro-choice TDs travelled the ‘abortion pill train’ and took the tablets to a rally in Dublin on their return.
Rita Harrold of ROSA (Reproductive rights, against Oppression, Sexism & Austerity) said thousands of women in Ireland are forced to make a difficult and expensive journey to abortion clinics in England.
“Yet, a safe, less costly option could be provided through medical abortion pills prescribed by our own GPs, as happens in many other countries,” she said.
More than 1,000 of the tablets have been seized in Ireland this year, mostly as they arrived into the country via mail order.
Medics say Ireland’s our anti- abortion laws are forcing women to order high-risk pills on the internet in a bid to end unwanted pregnancies.
Ms Coppinger, of the Socialist Party, said the political establishment are way behind ordinary people when it comes to abortion. “They continue to give Catholic beliefs centrality when a large majority now favour allowing abortion to protect women's health, both physical and mental,” she said.
“How can politicians justify maintaining a Constitutional Amendment now 31-years-old and on which no woman of child-bearing age had a say?
From
RTÉ
Hard to belive that women have to resort to this form of protest in this day and age. In a echo to a time only 43 years ago when women travelled north to 'smuggle' condoms into the Republic because contraception was banned here, today they still have to do the same to obtain the abortion pill (widely available elsewhere) bacause our governments havent got the balls to deal with it.
Meanwhile these same successive governments have turned their backs on the hundreds of thousands of young women over the years while they travelled abroad for terminations. Abortion clinics are also 'widely available elsewhere' but thats ok for our government and catholic church.
During the contraception trains of the early 70s Ireland was seen as a laughing stock.
Today we're still a laughing stock, but its also a hell of a lot more serious now as women's lives are at stake. Today's protest on the 2nd anniversary of the death of Savita Halappanavar is a stark reminder of that.
Its time to stop exporting our problems by pretending they don't exist and start importing the pills.
FAIR PLAY TO ALL THE PEOPLE ON THAT TRAIN TODAY.
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://wf.vanillicon.com/v2/f054c80ff399c4eba8d719c617220a57.svg)
