October 22 marked a decisive victory in the North of Ireland, as abortion was finally decriminalized. This news will surely have passed many people by — after all, in national as in international media, the North is almost only ever “represented” by the bigots in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). But last week, this stridently anti-choice party was finally overruled by the Westminster parliament. Its move to decriminalize abortion in the North came fifty years after a similar step was taken on the British mainland. Yet this success especially owes to decades of heroic struggles waged by Irish feminists.

The specific provisions criminalizing abortion had been passed by the imperial British Parliament in 1861, and until recent years remained law in both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland. Despite the part-legalization of abortion in Britain in 1967, it remained criminalized in the state known as Northern Ireland, which the British partitioned from the South in 1920. This situation did change, in part, in May 2018, as an overwhelming referendum vote in the South repealed the state’s constitutional ban on abortion (known as the Eighth Amendment). Yet there was no similar shift in the North.

This was the situation that the North is Now campaign sought to challenge. It defended the right to choose both for women and for the trans, gender-queer, nonbinary, and intersex people whose reproductive and health care rights are so often erased and misunderstood. With last week’s change in the law, a victory has been won for our right to control our own bodies. Yet as we shall see, the fight to guarantee free, safe, and legal abortions across the island of Ireland is not yet over.