Thursday 16th December saw the European Courts of Human Rights finally announce its judgements on a very important pro-choice case taken to the court by 3 women supported by the IFPA.  The WSM has been consistently involved in pro-choice struggles in the three decades of its existence and on Thursday as part of that involvement we were trying to provide coverage, analysis and background as the stories broke on WSM.IE.

Last week a friend on Facebook was complaining that she was getting Youth Defence ads.  Youth Defence are a virulently anti-choice organisation in Ireland, probably comparable to the likes of Operation Rescue in North America.  Anyway I was curious and asked her to do a screen capture if it re-appeared which it did.  I then realised this was a parallel campaign to the one they were running in the newspapers and that it all related to the ABC case in the European courts so I wrote up the article below for the WSM site to put it into context.

I spent Saturday evening at Semora Spraoi where RAG were screening two abortion rights documentaries, 'The Coat Hanger Project' and 'Abortion Democracy : Poland/South Africa'.  The makers of both documentaries were present so the screenings were introduced by them and there was a wide ranging discussion after the films had been show.  I've included a link to an audio recording of the introductions at the end of this piece.

Last night I gave a talk as part of a panel on pro-choice struggles in Ireland in NUI Maynooth.  The venue was a good measure of the huge changes around that issue over the last 20 years, it would have been impossible to imagine a pro-choice meeting in what is the catholic priest training college back in the 1980's never mind one without even an anti-choice picket in sight. Later on someone told me that the Sociology building itself had once been used to house nuns.