Abortion rights activists in Northern Ireland called on the British government to end what one group described as the province's "Victorian-era abortion ban" after neighboring Ireland voted by a landslide to liberalize its laws.

Official results showed on Saturday that 66 percent of voters in the once deeply Catholic Irish republic backed a referendum asking if they wished to scrap a prohibition that was enshrined in the constitution by referendum 35 years ago, and partly lifted in 2013 only for cases where the mother's life was in danger.

A socially conservative province where the Catholic and Protestant faiths exert strong influence, Northern Ireland allows abortion only when a mother's life is in danger. The penalty for undergoing or performing an unlawful abortion is life imprisonment.