WOMEN should not be criminalised for taking abortion pills, hundreds of pro-choice protesters heard last night.
A major rally was held in Belfast city centre against the north's strict abortion laws.
Protesters, including at least one young mother with a baby, converged on the Public Prosecution Service office on Chichester Street.
They gathered for well over an hour, chanting and waving banners with the slogans 'trust women' and 'not a criminal'.
The protest comes just days after a young woman, who took drugs online to terminate her pregnancy, was given a suspended prison sentence.
The woman, who did not have enough money to travel to England for an abortion, was reported to police by her flatmates after they found the foetus in the household bin.
Emma Campbell from Alliance for Choice, which organised the rally, said others were planned for several cities including London, Berlin, Galway, Derry and Dublin.
"We think it's unacceptable to criminalise women for accessing abortion pills, mostly because the 1,000 women every year who travel over to England aren't criminalised," she said.
"MLAs are happy for women to have abortions, just as long as they don't have them here."
She said the recent court case and the ongoing prosecution of a mother who obtained abortion pills for her under-age daughter when she became pregnant "definitely spurred this protest".
"We don't think it's fair on a woman who sought her only remedy for a crisis pregnancy," she said.
"We don't think the Public Prosecution Service should have seen this as in any way in the public interest. We are very confused why the police pursued the matter in the way that they did."
She also said more needs to be done to help women who are harassed outside the Marie Stopes family planning clinic in Belfast.
"It's against the law to harass people outside Marie Stopes," she said.
"I'm an escort outside Marie Stopes and I've faced harassment outside there. We have given evidence to police and the PPS (Public Prosecution Service). They haven't done anything about that."
She accused the SDLP and DUP of electioneering over the issue.
"I don't believe for a second that this isn't politically motivated," she said. "They (the SDLP and DUP) are absolutely committed to not changing the law on this for fear of losing their core religious voters, but actually the majority of people in Northern Ireland, as seen by the Amnesty poll, support a change in the law."
