After enduring vitriolic protests, criminal harassment and fears of violence, the director of the Marie Stopes clinic in Belfast is leaving one of the most divisive positions in the country. She says that despite it all, she is hopeful for the future

For Dawn Purvis, the low point was the start of last year. The 48-year-old former politician and programme director for Marie Stopes in Northern Ireland was leaving her office opposite Belfast’s opera house after staying late to work on a tricky case.

Anti-abortion protesters have been stationed outside every day since the clinic opened in October 2012, so their presence was nothing new. But Purvis had noticed what she calls an escalation, with women arriving for appointments in tears and being followed down the road and shouted at afterwards, behaviour she calls “public shaming”.

On 9 January the protests had been particularly vigorous – “vile” is her word – to the point where members of the public had stepped in. When Purvis left to the sound of heckles, she told the protesters to stop harassing her. Bernadette Smyth, leader of the anti-abortion group Precious Life, replied “you ain’t seen harassment yet darling”. The next day Purvis called the police.

“I suppose I did fear for my life,” says Purvis. “I had been feeling increasingly fearful for my own safety and this to me was a direct threat. I was thinking: ‘What’s next?’”

In two weeks time, Purvis is stepping down, with no job to go to. She says she isn’t giving up her job because of anti-abortion protests or harassment, because of the strain of dealing with people such as Smyth. She says leaving Marie Stopes is a wrench, but it’s time to move on now she has proved herself. And she points out that she will join the organisation’s Northern Ireland Advisory Board.

But hearing her talk about the hatred she saw directed towards her, and how fears about her personal safety began to leak through an undoubtedly tough shell, you have to wonder. For how long is it possible to live with that much stress?

Already famous locally as a politician, Purvis was used to being approached by strangers in the street, and wasn’t frightened of phonecalls or people knowing where she lived. “Northern Ireland,” she says, “is a very, very small place.” She put up with jeers such as “hope you can sleep at night”, “are you content to murder babies?” and “may God forgive you”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protests outside the clinic grew more vociferous … ‘It was just constant,’ Purvis says, ‘the looks of hatred in their faces.’ Photograph: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty

But she became frustrated during the clinic’s first year by a situation in which the police were powerless to take action unless an individual woman made a complaint. Since the women wanted privacy and had often come to Marie Stopes for this reason, it was no surprise when they didn’t. As the activists grew more vociferous, Purvis became afraid. “It was just constant,” she says, “the looks of hatred in their faces.”

“My fear was of violence. I wasn’t sleeping, I had changed my route to work, I was getting friends to call and meet me when I finished in the evening, I was getting taxis more often than walking,” she says. “I didn’t necessarily believe these people themselves were going to carry out an act of violence, but maybe somebody associated with or inspired by them.”

She had seen Smyth meeting US anti-abortion campaigners in the film After Tiller about the Kansas abortion doctor murdered by an activist in 2009. Her worries about the violence associated with the most extreme US anti-abortion groups, combined with her firsthand knowledge of Northern Ireland’s violent past, made her anxious. “Because you can see the hatred, you know there is that potential. Ignorance breeds hatred and hatred can breed violence. That’s the kind of society I grew up in, and I know it’s still there.”

Last year’s trial, which saw Smyth convicted of criminal harassment and sentenced to 100 hours’ community service, came as a huge relief, as did a restraining order keeping her away from the clinic. Smyth claimed her remark was a joke, and an appeal against her conviction and sentence will be heard next month, so Purvis is preparing to give evidence again. But whatever happens, she says, last year’s ruling helped.

I meet Purvis in her sparsely furnished eighth-floor office, blinds drawn against a cloudy sky, grey city and Belfast hills in the background. The clinic is neutral, functional, a buzzer admitting visitors past a cramped reception to a short corridor off which are two treatment rooms, Purvis’s office, a “fees room” (treatment here is private, with reduced fees for those unable to afford the standard £350), kitchen and toilets. Since the clinic offers only medical abortions, in which a pregnancy of up to nine weeks is ended by pills, there is no operating theatre.

With her dark hair, bright blue shirt, black boots and total self-possession when answering questions about fearing for her life while posing for the Guardian’s photographer, Purvis seems more politician than clinic director. But she speaks so calmly, and answers questions in such a matter-of-fact way, briskly correcting me when I get things wrong, that it isn’t until I play back the recording of our conversation that the full impact of her answers hits me, and I wonder exactly what that kind of pressure would do to you.

Breedagh Hughes, Northern Ireland director of the Royal College of Midwives, thinks the vitriol first shocked and then changed Purvis, and that the final straw came when her son was targeted. “I think she’s a sadder person,” Hughes tells me when I phone to ask what she, as Purvis’s friend, makes of all this, “though I doubt she’d tell you that. Most of all, I think she finds the daily condemnation of women who use Marie Stopes very hard to deal with. I think she felt impotent, and I also think, as a unionist, it offends her. She feels let down that the union she supports so strongly won’t offer the same service to women in Northern Ireland that it offers women in England, Scotland and Wales.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters outside the Belfast clinic when it opened in 2012. Photograph: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty

Abortion is not illegal in Northern Ireland, as often used to be said, and has now mostly stopped being said, partly thanks to Marie Stopes’ decision to open a clinic there. But the 1967 Abortion Act does not apply, so the law is different from the rest of the UK. Under the Criminal Justice Act (Northern Ireland) of 1945, an offence is not committed if an abortion is “done in good faith for the purpose only of preserving the life of the mother”. In 2003 a judicial review found that “the life of the mother” does not only relate to life-threatening emergencies but also to serious, permanent or long-term risks to her physical or mental health or wellbeing. Unlike in the rest of the UK, only one doctor’s opinion is required.

So abortions are allowed and are carried out on the NHS in Northern Ireland, but numbers are extremely small and only recently began to be published: just 51 terminations in 2012/13 (with a slightly larger number of “medical abortions”, or operations offered to women who have had miscarriages at the point of seeking treatment). Bodies including Marie Stopes and the Family Planning Association complain that such services are inaccessible, and Purvis says they are offered on a “postcode lottery basis”, with GPs often being unhelpful, and that there is massive stigma attached to them. Around 1,000 women travel to England for abortions each year, along with 5,000 from the Republic of Ireland, while similar numbers seek treatment in Holland.

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Purvis grew up and still lives not far away from where we are talking, in “a very deprived working-class area where women who got themselves into trouble had to take a boat to Liverpool in the middle of the night – and that was women who had money”. Women who didn’t would make an appointment with an alcoholic backstreet abortionist, struck off the medical register for manslaughter and known to haunt the bar of a local hotel. When Purvis was seven or eight, a local woman took her along for moral support when she booked herself in.

Purvis’s parents were both Mormons, and split up when she was two. She gave up her faith, left school at 16, married and had two sons in her 20s, finding jobs to fit around her children – “you name it, I did it – burger bars, off-licence, catering, shop assistant, sales, home help, care assistant”. After the ceasefires were called in 1994, a friend who was a former UVF prisoner knocked on her door to ask if she wanted to join the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), which had UVF members among its founders and maintained close links. Purvis “told him to clear off”, but later changed her mind and was elected branch secretary at her first meeting, having decided that the small, leftwing party led by former paramilitary David Ervine represented something authentic about the world she came from.

“The mainstream politicians always said Northern Ireland would be a wonderful place if only the bad people would go away,” she remembers. “But the bad people were my next-door neighbours, my friends’ fathers and brothers and uncles. They didn’t parachute in from another planet. Something happened here that made these people react in the way they did, and from a very early age I always thought they had to be included in some way.”

At 33, she went to Queen’s University and graduated with first-class honours, the first person in her family to get a degree. This, like her involvement in politics, was life-changing, and in 2007, following Ervine’s sudden death, she became PUP leader and assembly member for Belfast East.

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Purvis left the PUP in 2010 when the murder of Bobby Moffett was blamed on the UVF, and the following year lost her seat. She says “never say never” when I ask about a return to politics, but she is more focused on individuals than parties, and has yet to decide which of two pro-choice candidates to vote for next month.

The situation is fast-moving, or at least moving: in February the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission won a review of laws refusing abortion in cases of rape and incest, while the Department of Justice ran a public consultation on cases of lethal foetal abnormality, as well as sex crimes. But the health minister, the DUP’s Jim Wells, is anti-choice and has tabled an amendment banning abortions outside NHS hospitals.

Purvis says her staff of eight part-timers saw nearly 600 women in 2014 – four times as many as in 2013, and “that’s tremendous”. Around 40% of these women came from the Republic of Ireland, where abortion is even more restricted. Most were older than 25 and in relationships, many had used contraception and some were desperate: a spike in numbers around the beginning of February was the result of rapes by abusive partners during the Christmas period.

Purvis leaves her job having just recruited a new batch of volunteer escorts – people who lead clients in and out past the protesters and placards outside. One side effect of their introduction has been to make arrests for harassment easier, as escorts are more likely than clients to make complaints, and police files have been sent to prosecutors.

“I’m quite hopeful,” Purvis tells me. “Working here has confirmed to me that Northern Ireland is a different place.” On my tape there are church bells in the background. I leave the clinic, where today just a couple of protesters are reading prayers in the doorway, thinking Dawn Purvis deserves an honour for public service.