Darcy Jimenez

Kate* had been with her boyfriend for two years when she became pregnant. The couple hadn’t been using birth control - but not because they were hoping for a baby. At 23, Kate didn’t want to conceive at all. She felt so uncomfortable using the contraceptive methods available to her that she had purposefully been going without, preferring to risk getting pregnant instead.

Earlier this year, pro-choice activists in Gibraltar were hopeful that their territory’s abortion laws – the harshest in Europe – could soon be overturned. Terminations are banned in the tiny British territory, even in the cases of rape, incest, or foetal abnormality where the foetus will not survive. Abortions are punishable by life imprisonment, except when the woman’s life is in danger.

Kim was 13 years old when she started selling guns for a teenage boy she met at a party. “Being female, it’s a lot easier for me to sell the guns,” she says. “Because I was very young, I was the one that would do the drop-offs. It was quite fun at the time. I felt a bit invincible.”

Two empty Dolmio sauce jars was all it took for the relief to kick in. Spotting them in her recycling bin as she added her empties from the week, Anna, 47, can still recall how the sight of them made her feel. ‘I remember being so grateful they were in there and not just beer and wine bottles clanking around,’ explains the mum-of-two.

The earliest chemically confirmed beer ever discovered dates back to around 3000 BC. Despite about five thousand years of beer drinking having passed since then, beer is still generally considered the beverage of men. In celebration of the UK’s national Beer Day (15 June), I spoke to the founder of a women-run brewery that’s working to change that.