For Reproductive Rights   Repeal the 8th Amendment and legislate for a woman’s right to choose. Abortion should be provided through the health service, without cost and shame, for all who need it Banning abortion not only endangers women’s lives and health, but it also serves to restrict women’s freedom, sexual and personal. It’s a human right to have control over your own body Fully free and available contraception and sexual health services including access to IVF on the public health service Programme of secular & progressive sex education in schools   Against Oppression For full LGBTQ equality. Challenge …

A new Government has finally been formed & its neoliberal Programme for Government will continue the assault on social welfare & public services , with women particularly victimised by this. The fact that the 8th amendment is mentioned on page 158 of an 160 page document symbolises that this Government wants to continue to put this issue on the back-burner. We do not need any “Citizen’s Assembly” that is an anti-democratic attempt to delay & obstruct the will of 80% of the population for a repeal 8 referendum. We also cannot trust any such initiative …

This is a discussion document written for a ROSA national meeting in April of 2016. It documents some of the work of ROSA in the last three years and makes the case for socialist-feminism. ROSA was established in March 2013 by women in the Socialist Party, and has subsequently flourished into a broad-based activist group in Dublin, with fledgling groups in Cork and Limerick and supporters further afield. It’s acronym stands for Reproductive rights, against Oppression Sexism & Austerity, and it’s open to anyone who supports this message to get involved in. ROSA is named …

ROSA member, Diana O’Dwyer, recently visited feminist and socialist activists in Warsaw and Krakow for International Women’s Day on a trip organised by the sister organisation of the Socialist Party, Alternatywa Socjalistyczna. In some ways, the struggle for abortion rights in Poland seems to be moving in the opposite direction to here but there are also many parallels between the two countries. She writes here about what we can learn from the Polish struggle for abortion rights. In Poland, the dominance of the Catholic Church has grown along with the restoration of capitalism in the …