October 28/November 4, 2019 The Nation. 11AP PHOTO
the Supreme Court’s right wing have its way.
In Ireland, where the near-total ban on abortion was
repealed in a 2018 referendum, self-managed abortion
helped change people’s minds. Voters saw that abortion
could not be stopped; when the postal service impound-
ed suspicious packages, women had the pills mailed
to different addresses or obtained them by hand from
underground networks. Goretti Horgan, a socialist fem-
inist campaigner and professor at Ulster University, has
been working for years to legalize abortion in Northern
Ireland. (The procedure is illegal there, except in cases of
grave danger to the woman’s life.) The use of pills is very
widespread here,” she told me, “and there is just no way
to stop it.” As in Ireland, pills have played an important
role in building support for decriminalization, which
seems imminent, unless the two major parties can put
together a last-minute power-sharing agreement. “Peo-ple saw that even when they face prosecution, desperate
women will do anything to stop a pregnancy.”
Recent studies show that about 1,000 Northern Irish
women traveled to England for legal clinic terminations
last year and about 700 ordered illegal pills at home in- If enough women deprived of legal abortion turn
to pills rather than keep unwanted pregnancies, will
Americans, too, see that abortion is unstoppable and
force politicians to legislate accordingly? “You mustn’t
get too upset about the makeup of your court,” Horgan
said cheerfully, recalling how in 1992 massive demon-
strations made the Supreme Court reverse a lower court
ruling barring Miss X, a 14-year-old rape victim, from
going to England for a termination.
In the end, Horgan said, the status of abortion will
come down to people power—and maybe some pill
power too. Q
“People saw that
even when they
face prosecu-
tion, desperate
women will do
anything to stop
a pregnancy,”
said professor
Goretti Horgan.SNAPSHOT / MATT DUNHAMRallies Heating Up
Environmental protesters gather around the head
of a statue confiscated by police on Lambeth
Bridge in central London on October 7. Activists
from Extinction Rebellion blocked roads leading
to Britain’s Parliament in an attempt to disrupt the
government. Police made nearly 500 arrests.Calvin Trillin
Deadline Poet
ON TRUMP ASKING
CHINA TO INVESTIGATE
THE BIDENS“You really do believe he was serious?”
—Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH)
on ABC’s This Week
Jim Jordan has said that it’s clear
That this was a joke Trump contrived—
Which makes it, of course, quite all right.
A new Billy Bush has arrived.