If someone were to tell you that in the modern day UK abortion is illegal you’d probably laugh in their face at such a statement. You’d probably write it off as ridiculous and not worth your time debating considering a simple google search will tell you that abortion has been legal in the UK since 1967. It might then be a surprise for you to hear that just yesterday a woman was handed a three month suspended sentence for two years for having an abortion.

A 21-year-old Co. Down woman who was facing life imprisonment for having an abortion through the use of pills obtained on the internet has been given a suspended sentence.  It is understood that after failing to raise the funds to have a legal abortion in England she ordered the drugs, Mifepristone and Misoprostal in order to have the abortion

You can always tell when there’s an election just round the corner. Investment announcements, over grinning politicians in the press looking for another go only this time they REALLY promise things will be better. Others hoping to be elected doing all sorts just to get their photograph in the papers, again promising us the moon and the stars. However the gloves are off in Derry’s Bogside as news filters out that a sizeable section of social housing stock, currently owned by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), now plan to offer them up for sale to private sector housing bodies.

Several hundred residents now fear that private housing associations in the city will totally transform the way in which they have engaged with the Housing Executive over the past four decades. Particularly when it comes to levels of rent and of course allocation of housing which first gave birth to a new generation of street politics and the Civil Rights Association back in the late sixties.

Last November the High Court in Belfast ruled that the near blanket ban on abortion was incompatible with human rights legislation the cases of rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormalities.  While it was a landmark ruling and is reflective of the change in society from the days of religious domination it doesn't change the law. The ruling does nothing other than place pressure on Stormont to change the law.

So why is it that two high profile appeals have been submitted against the ruling? One of them from the Attorney General, John Larkin, a well known anti-choicer, and the other from the Minister of Justice, David Ford.

On Sunday, a group of WSM and other anarchists took part in the annual March for Justice in Derry which commemorates the civil rights marchers who were shot dead by the British Parachute Regiment on 30 January 1972.

Read Bloody Sunday in Derry - Origins & Consequences of a Massacre

December saw the promotion of Fermanagh & South Tyrone MLA, Arlene Foster to the position of DUP leader and the North of Ireland’s First Minister.

Foster is a woman who was once described to have “learned a lot from the likes of Thatcher when it comes to dealing with men in politics."

It is not coming as much of a surprise that some middle-class, career-focused feminists have made claims of this being some sort of an advance of feminism. Many are claiming that this represents a great change in northern Irish society, as a move away from the male dominated arena that we understands politics here to be (the same could be said throughout the World of course).