How to Win the Abortion Argument
In May 2016, three women walked into a police station in Derry, Northern Ireland, and gave themselves up. They were unlikely criminals—all born in the 1940s, they arrived wearing warm coats and jeans. But Colette Devlin, Diana King, and Kitty O’Kane were deadly serious about their willingness to spend years in prison. Their offense: These three women had bought abortion pills on the internet.
I wrote about Devlin, King, and O’Kane in my history of feminism, Difficult Women, because they represented a type of unshowy grassroots activism that I find humbling and that will become ever more important in a post-Roe America. If anything close to Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion becomes an official Supreme Court ruling this summer, the effect on reproductive freedom will be immediate. Nine states have pre-Roe laws, currently unenforced, to ban all or nearly all abortion; 13 more have post-Roe bans that would be activated by the decision, according to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.
When I went to meet the Derry activists, in 2018, Northern Ireland had a near-total ban on abortion, too. Although it is part of the United Kingdom, whose 1967 Abortion Act legalized terminations under certain conditions, Northern Ireland had been granted an exemption. Amid decades of conflict between Catholics and Protestants, leaders of the two religious factions could agree on one thing: They were opposed to a woman’s right to choose. The law in
