A GROUP of pro-choice activists plans to defy the law by driving a bus across Ireland next week to offer abortion pills to women with unwanted pregnancies, putting them at risk of a 14-year prison sentence.
The act of civil disobedience is being organised by Rosa, a reproductive-rights group set up by Ruth Coppinger, a Socialist party TD, and other female party members following the death in 2012 of Savita Halappanavar, a pregnant woman at University Hospital Galway after being refused a termination.
The Abortion Pill Bus will give information to women about how to procure abortion pills. It will leave Dublin on Friday and travel to Galway, Limerick, Cork and Kilkenny.
Organisers say pregnant women who need access to the pills will be accommodated after undergoing an online consultation with doctors from Women on Web, a Dutch non-profit organisation that distributes abortion pills in countries where abortion is illegal or restricted, in return for a small donation.
Coppinger said Rosa members will be procuring the pills in Northern Ireland. “By flagrantly defying the law on abortion, we hope to show up the impossibility of the state maintaining this ban,” she said. “People are using these pills now to have abortions in their own bedrooms, despite this barbaric and outdated archaic law.”