by Monika Dragojlovic, volunteer at H.E.R.A. in Macedonia

On the 28th of September, the global day of action for safe and legal abortion, H.E.R.A organized a national conference called “Legal restrictions to safe and legal abortion”. This event gathered all relevant stakeholders to discuss the new abortion law which was introduced by the Macedonian government two years ago. We used this opportunity to ask all participants to choose a message and to take a picture. Members of the national Parliament, such as is Radmila Shekerinska from the Green Party (pictured above) and Radmila Shekerinska from the Social Democrats, took photos and shared them on their Facebook profiles. The law professor Karolina Ristova-Aasterud from the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje also posted a picture. (H.E.R.A. filed a request to challenge the law in Macedonia’s Constitutional Court, together with Prof. Aasterud). The photos attracted a lot of attention on social media as you can see below:

PROF AASTERUD
Prof.Aasterud: “my uterus, my decision” 411 likes and 29, 773 people reached.
L.Popovska: “abortion must be safe and legal” 5,173 people reached, 61 likes and 18 shares
L.Popovska: “abortion must be safe and legal”
5,173 people reached, 61 likes and 18 shares

As part of the project, a tweet-a-thon was also planned. More than 70 tweets were sent from the H.E.R.A twitter account, using the hashtags #abortion and #BustTheMyths. #Abortion was ‘hashtag of the day’ according the “Macedonia trending” twitter profile that generates most used hashtags and most popular twitter profiles.

“The decision about abortion is a personal decision, the stigma just makes it harder.”

We also shot pictures in the city park. We were expecting more young people at that time of day, but it turns out it was full of parents with young children. This was actually great for us, because we had photos with young parents and their babies which is literally showing that being pro-choice is not equal to anti-life, a common mis-understanding among people in Macedonia. We were explaining our project to everyone interested in the photo shoot and talked about why raising awareness about abortion and abortion stigma is important. There were of course people who did not want to participate, but the main reason was that they didn’t want to be in a photo, however they did not express their opinion about abortion. We also met celebrities in the city park, who participated in the photo shoot such as Ognen Janeski, a journalist in 24 News, Irena Ristic, an actress, and Ranko Bubamara, owner of the Bubamara Radio.