justinspoliticalcorner:

Hannah Al-Othman at BuzzFeed News: 

Campaigners in Northern Ireland celebrated on the stroke of midnight as abortion and same-sex marriage became legal for the first time in history.

Northern Ireland was the only place in either the United Kingdom or the island of Ireland without equal marriage, and where abortion was outlawed in almost all circumstances.

The Republic of Ireland voted decisively in favour of legalising same-sex marriage in a referendum in May 2015, while another landslide vote in a second referendum in May 2018 repealed the eighth amendment of the constitution, which said that abortion was almost always illegal.

Equal marriage and abortion — subject to certain conditions — was already legal in the rest of the United Kingdom, and there had been continued pressure on the government to bring Northern Ireland into line.

The Supreme Court had already ruled that Northern Ireland’s strict laws were incompatible with human rights, and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women found that Northern Ireland’s abortion laws meant that women were “subjected to grave and systematic violations of rights through being compelled to either travel outside Northern Ireland to procure a legal abortion or to carry their pregnancy to term.”

However, ministers had been reluctant to act saying the issues had been devolved to Northern Ireland’s Stormont Assembly.

However, in July members of Parliament in Westminster voted in favour of an amendment put forward by Labour’s Stella Creasy to decriminalise abortion and one put forward by her colleague Conor McGinn to approve same-sex marriage.

The amendments to the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill allowed Stormont – which has not sat since January 2017 after power-sharing broke down – to step in and overrule Westminster if it has resumed before Oct. 22, but despite the DUP returning on Monday to protest the new law, without Sinn Fein MLAs there, their bid to halt the legal changes failed.