Ireland has a near-total ban on abortion, pushing thousands of women every year to travel abroad for a termination and others to break the law by taking abortion pills. On International Women's Day on Wednesday, women across Ireland will protest for a change in the law.





Sarah didn't know where to turn when she found out she was pregnant. It was May last year, she was 23, finishing her final year at university, and working in a cafe to save for a move from her small Irish hometown to Dublin. Waiting for her in the city were her boyfriend and a traineship. She wasn't ready to be a mother, but her birth control had failed. Sat in her bedroom at home, she started to panic.

"I felt so alone," she said tearfully, over tea in Dublin last week. "You want to take it a step at a time but I had no idea what the next step was." Downstairs at home were her parents, who would have forced her to have the baby, she said. When she tried to raise the issue of abortion, hypothetically, they told her it was murder. "Murder, they said, and that was that."

Ireland has a near-total ban on abortion, including in cases of rape, incest or fatal abnormalities, and a 14-year prison sentence hangs over anyone who has one. In the early 1980s, fearing that it could be legalise via the courts, the country's Catholic hierarchy pushed for an amendment to be added to the constitution. The Eighth Amendment passed in 1983 and granted a fotus equal right to life as its mother, effectively outlawing abortion in all circumstances.