This year Belfast saw its largest pro-choice demonstration when about a thousand people took to the streets for the Rally for Choice.  This was a significant achievement and to mark it we’ve put together this brief documentary featuring footage from the march, some of the speakers and interviews with both organisers and participants.

Have you been noticing pro-choice graffiti around Belfast recently?  There has been a massive increase in the amount of political propaganda around Belfast the past few weeks, which has most likely been inspired by the recent criminalisation of a young woman for having an illegal abortion here; something that many women are forced to do.

Our reporter talked to some of the people involved.  
"It’s important to strike every blow we can against things as they stand, no matter how small the blow provided the outcome is bigger than the input.

We are constantly subjected to sexist advertising on billboards and outside shops and religious propaganda on buses, it is only right that we take back the city to display our demands, and our messages.

Belfast saw a fantastic Rally for Choice march July 2nd 2016  - by far the biggest pro- choice demonstration in the north in many years, perhaps ever.

Despite being organised on a shoe string is was also bigger than the annual anti - choice march. Even though the organizers of that have access to so much money they had billboard vans driving around the city advertising their event.

We have mobilised for and will be covering the Belfast Rally for Choice today via on Facebook and Twitter accounts. Below is a last minute message from the organisers.

Today we march, and today they march.

For the first time on this island there will be mass mobilisations of the pro choice movement and the anti choice movement.

This is a personal account from a member who was recently subjected to a sexist, homophobic attack. This post mentions male violence, anti-choice mentality, and the toxicity of masculinity.

Toxic masculinity has been a trending topic of discussion lately with the case of Brock Turner who raped an unconscious woman and received a meagre 3 months in jail for his atrocious crime, and the homophobic Orlando shooting committed by Omar Mateen a week ago which claimed the lives of 49 people and injured over 50.

The WSM and Need Abortion Ireland are running a bus to the July 2nd Rally for Choice in Belfast.  Tickets will be 10 euro and we would encourage you to buy a ticket as soon as possible as if we fill the bus soon we will then get a second bus.  If you can't go or if you have some spare cash you can make a donation towards the cost of the bus at our paypal link below.  Donations of 10 euro or more will allow us to subsidise some of the tickets for those on very low or no income. 

ONLINE SALES HAVE CLOSED.  THERE WILL BE A FEW SEATS AVAILABLE TOMORROW AT 10AM ON A FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED BASIS.  GET TO THE HUGH LANE AT 10 AND YOU'LL HAVE A GOOD CHANCE OF BEING ABLE TO TRAVEL.

It is all but impossible, both in theory and in practice, to legally obtin an abortion on the island of Ireland, both north and south of the imaginary border that divides this island. It is completely impossible to safely and legally obtain an abortion anywhere in Ireland;  the legal framework in the south specifically requires that in order to obtain an abortion without being criminalised for so doing, the woman who needs it must be ill enough to die; thus it is rendered impossible for her to be safe in access to legal abortion.

Monday night in Derry three women, Diana King, Colette Devlin, and Kitty O'Kane handed themselves into a Police Station admitting to helping women and other pregnant people access the abortion pill through supplying it. These three courageous women have risked their freedom so that never again will women be made criminals of by having an abortion.

After a lifetime's worth of dealing with the oppressive force of this law they decided that enough was enough and the state must be confronted; the law must be made a mockery of by highlighting that it is broken all the time.