Northern Ireland’s largest trade union has said that all women who go to hospitals with miscarriages could be questioned about whether they had taken abortion pills.
The warning followed a woman being found guilty of procuring the medication for a termination. Unite has called for an end to the criminalisation of local women who take abortion pills.
Unite also on Wednesday challenged the entire trade union movement in the region to support a woman’s right to choose.
The 1967 Abortion Act does not apply in Northern Ireland and instead women who have abortions in the region can be prosecuted under the 19th-century Offences Against the Person Act.
Taryn Trainor, the regional equality officer for Unite, called for the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) Northern Ireland committee to fully support women who have been prosecuted for taking abortion pills.
A judge in Belfast last week imposed a three-month jail sentence on a 21-year-old woman who took abortion pills when she was 19. The sentence was then suspended over one year.
She was prosecuted after her housemates in Belfast reported her to the police.
Belfast crown court heard that she purchased the pills over the internet because she could not afford to travel like thousands of other Northern Irish women to an English clinic for an abortion.
Another woman is facing similar charges after she was informed on after allegedly procuring abortion pills for her underage pregnant daughter.
Speaking at an ICTU regional conference in Derry, Trainor said the entire union movement must lobby the Public Prosecution Service to drop prosecutions against these women.
She said: “It’s not acceptable that women are being criminalised for making choices about when they have children. It’s not acceptable that it is legal to access abortion and purchase abortion pills in the rest of the UK but it is unlawful here in Northern Ireland.
“This young woman now has a criminal record that will have implications for her future career. It will also stop her from obtaining visas to travel. Is it the case now that women are going to have to justify miscarriages in case anyone suspects they took abortion pills?”
The union conference in Derry later adopted the Unite motion unanimously.
