As we do every year, we’ve been asking you to tell us why you are marching in this year’s March for Choice on the 29th of September. Kathy is a poet and a member of Rebels4Choice, the Cork branch of the Abortion Rights Campaign.

I’m marching because women and pregnant people are still being forced to travel or to break the law to access abortion care in this country, because our work is not yet done. Because there are people who can’t do either of these things, and these people are still being forced to remain pregnant against their wishes. Because I’m a social care worker and a woman and a person. And I’m marching for my grandmother, who was taken out of school after primary, married at eighteen and gave birth to sixteen children over the course of her life, though she told one of her daughters that she had loved learning and would have loved to study more. I’m marching for all the women in my past who were never able to make a choice about whether to be pregnant, and I’m marching because I still, today, do not have that choice.

More than anything, I’m marching because I have learned that our voices count, that our voices are many and that we have the power to make great changes in this country and to show other countries that change is possible. We repealed the eighth amendment, and we can do so much more. I’m going to keep marching.