Workers Solidarity Movement

For the past three years hundreds of people have taken to the streets to take part in the Feminist Walking Tour of Dublin, marking International Women's Day. Following the enormous success of previous years, we are once again stepping out to tell the often forgotten stories of the Dublin women who have shaped the world we live in.

Today is work-life balance day. "Hurrah!" you think. Think again. Despite how friendly it sounds, work-life balance is not something to celebrate. There are three things to know about work-life balance.

In the aftermath of the European court of Human Rights finding that the Irish state had violated the rights of a woman who was unable to get an abortion in Ireland a poll in the Sunday Times has confirmed that almost 9 out of every 10 people want abortion available in such cases. This result is a massive defeat for the well funded anti-choice movement that spent hundreds of thousands in an anti-choice advertising campaign in advance of the ruling.

Donal Fallon profiles some of the women who played a large part in the illustrious history of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Saturday 18th December saw activists from a number of pro-choice organizations including the WSM rally at the GPO in Dublin to mark the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the ABC case. The short rally which took place in the bitter cold had been called at just over 24 hours notice by the Feminist Open Forum but still attracted a few dozen activists who have been involved in campaigning against Ireland's ban on abortion in the last decades.

Doctors For Choice welcomes the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in favour of one of the three women applicants in the ABC case and demands that the government now legislate on abortion provision as a matter of urgency. Much time wasting and obstruction has taken place while womens health has been, and continues to be compromised by the lack of abortion provision in Ireland. This ruling confirms what Irish doctors have known for many years; that Irish women are being denied reproductive justice in their own country. The three cases were representative of a broad spectrum of women who are forced to travel abroad to access abortion.

Dr Mary Favier, a Cork GP and a founder member of Doctors for Choice, says the ABC case decision is a hugely welcome, important and significant decision. That will make a fundamental difference and force the government to legislate for the X Case. She then explains the background to the ABC v Ireland case currently before the European Court of Human Rights. She explains why the outcome of the case (and the issues it raises) are central to the predicament currently faced my thousands of Irish women every year in Ireland. Pointing out the Irish Government has fought the three women (A, B and C) along every step of their long and arduous route to the European Court, she also addresses the issue of the silence of within the Irish medical profession in relation to the matter of abortion. Over 5000 Irish women leave Ireland each year to have abortions in European countries.

Sevinc Karaca, a Turkish anarchist and feminist, describes the fine line that Muslim women must navigate between Islam and the West. "In all Muslim countries, women had to wait until the 1970s and 1980s for a feminist movement that questioned the practise of religion and its role in the oppression of women. As Feminists in the West beat around the bush with an air of multi-culturalist political correctness and go out of their way to show respect for exotic religions, there is a growing number of feminists in countries like Turkey and Iran and among the diaspora in non- Muslim countries whose policies and strategies for feminism do not take the route of Western Liberal Feminism. The majority of feminist ideologies and activism in the developed world today do not address and support the struggle of their Muslim comrades openly, directly or sufficiently."

A decade ago the US First Lady Mrs. Bush’s went on the radio in the first solitary address of any president’s wife in U.S. history to dare all decent people of the world to join the US and its allies in freeing the women of Afghanistan from the “brutal terrorism” of Islamic fundamentalism. Almost ten years later this explanation continues, Time Magazine weighed in with its July 2010 headline, What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan. This story about ‘freeing’ Afghan women only became politically expedient when the aim of capturing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda proved harder to do than anticipated. So the Bush Administration asked Laura to polish off that erstwhile story of the savage East in need of an altruistic West, and they cleverly reinvented orientalism in the guise of “the woman question.”

Through a 'Freedom of information' request the pro-choice campaigning group Choice Ireland have revealed that over a thousand desperate women were denied an abortion last year because customs seized the medicine that they had ordered over the internet. In many cases these women were unable to travel to Britain because of poverty or because they were immigrants who felt unable to risk leaving Ireland lest they be refused readmission.