I Was Two When Ireland Voted To Make Me Equal To A Zygote

I’ll be marching for choice tomorrow. It will be the third march me and my husband have been on to seek change so I’m not equal to a zygote.

I wasn’t always as militantly prochoice as I am now. To my shame and regret, I allowed the myths and lies peddled to me as a schoolgirl educated in a single sex Catholic school to blind me to the truth.

I’m marching because I am not equal to a zygote. I am not a woman who can’t afford to take an airplane ride, get into a taxi and pay for abortion services in another country. I’m marching because the eighth amendment affects women who don’t have as much money as me, who don’t have the legal rights to leave the country as I do and who don’t have choices because they are too sick or young or have other responsibilities they can’t leave for a day or a weekend.

I was two in 1983. I have never been able to vote to make Ireland’s abortion laws less stringent. I have never had the option to take WHO essential medicines to end a pregnancy I do not wish to continue. If I am pregnant, I will have to wait for doctors to determine whether my life is at risk before I may be able to have an abortion. If I’m dead and pregnant, my husband may have to watch me decompose while the High Court decides whether a foetus has more rights over my body than I have the right to dignity.

I’m marching because I’m mad as hell that people who have made a career out of providing balance tell women that we ‘deserve better’ and skirt around the fact that all they really want is for the poor, the sick and the silenced to be forced to fulfil the myth they cling to that Ireland is better without WHO essential medication and choice for all women.

We do deserve better. We deserve better than having to march for the umpteenth time, having to publicly beg others to vote so we’re no longer equal to a zygote. We deserve better than facing the possibility of being the next letter in the alphabet in the High or Supreme Court.