Northern Irish Abortion Laws Are 'Incompatible With Human Rights', But Law Makers Don't Care

"If I had been in England, I would have been able to take a tablet and be supervised. But because I didn't have that, because what I was doing was illicit and illegal, I put myself at great risk. And why? Why is that?" Such is the statement of an anonymous woman, her face blacked out to protect her identity. This woman had an abortion, you see, and that is illegal where she lives.

Several countries have such stringent abortion laws that terminating a pregnancy is illegal even if not doing so would put the woman's life in danger, even if she was raped, and even if the fetus has a birth defect that is incompatible with life. These countries include El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Malta. The woman who made the statement, though, isn't from any of these countries. Instead, she's from a European Union country, from a place that is part of Great Britain — this woman is from Northern Ireland. 

Speaking to the British newspaper The Guardian, she goes on to lament the fact that she's deemed a British citizen in every other way, but not when it comes to abortion rights. As the result of the stringent abortion laws in Northern Ireland, the woman ordered tablets to induce an abortion off the internet, something many other women who face an unwanted pregnancy in Ireland do too. In addition, around 5,000 of her fellow Irish women travel to England to obtain pregnancy terminations each year.

What Does The Law Say?

In the Republic of Ireland, abortion is illegal unless done to save the mother's life. In Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, a 19th-century law is in force and the UK Abortion Act 1967 has never applied. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission states:

Termination of pregnancy is currently available in Northern Ireland if it is necessary to preserve the life of a woman where there is a risk of a serious and adverse effect on her physical or mental health which is either long term or permanent. 

It is unlawful to perform a termination of pregnancy unless on these grounds. The punishment is life imprisonment for anyone who unlawfully performs a termination. Termination of pregnancy based solely on malformation of the fetus is unlawful in Northern Ireland.

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The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is currently seeking a law change. It isn't to have the Abortion Act 1967 applied within Northern Ireland, something that would give residents of Northern Ireland the same rights to abortion as women in the rest of the UK, but simply to allow "women and girls in Northern Ireland [to] have the choice of accessing a termination of pregnancy in circumstances of serious malformation of the fetus, rape or incest."

That should not be so controversial, should it?

Will Women In Northern Ireland Ever Gain Legal Access To Abortion?

Back in December 2015, a High Court Judge indeed ruled that current abortion legislation in Northern Ireland is incompatible with human rights. However, the judge proceeded to make the following statement:

There is near unanimity among the parties in this judicial review, and that includes the (Northern Ireland Human Rights) Commission, that for this court to try and read the impugned provisions in a (human rights) Convention-compliant way would be a step too far.

Having given due consideration to all submissions and the arguments raised therein, I conclude that such a view is correct.

What exactly is "a step too far"? The judge here referred to the possibility of legalizing abortions for women other than those who got pregnant as the result of sexual crimes, and those carrying babies who have fetal abnormalities incompatible with life. Rather than ruling abortion to be legal in such situations and apparently potentially opening the law to abortions in other circumstances as well, the judge simply opted to declare the current law "incompatible with human rights". What that means is that the Northern Ireland Assembly, commonly referred to as Stormont, was given the responsibility to deal with the matter. 

The ruling allowed for a six-week window of time in which an appeal could be lodged, something Stormont's Justice Minister, David Ford, said he would be doing on January 27. His reason?

Rather, he said, "the assembly should be legislating to ensure that women carrying a fetus with a fatal abnormality are able to access an abortion". What about women find themselves pregnant as the result of sexual crimes, then? If Mr Ford gets his way, they can forget about the right to abortion and will continue to have no choice but to travel elsewhere to access abortion, or order abortion pills online. Why? ""...My department consulted over a year ago on the issue of both fatal fetal abnormality and sexual crime," Ford said, concluding: "In that consultation, it was not possible to see an easy way through as to how you would determine if a sexual crime had happened." It's the old "women who say they were raped might be lying" idea, in other words. 

What Now?

Over the last few months, women from Ireland have been speaking out about the situations they have faced when they found themselves dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, women exactly like the one mentioned at the beginning of the article. Some even showed their faces and admitted to helping other pregnant women obtain abortion pills, something that can carry a life sentence.

The woman we mentioned at the beginning of this piece makes it clear that "forced pregnancy, to me, is a crime." By almost completely banning legal access to abortion, a country decides that it is acceptable to force women to stay pregnant despite their will. 

The real question is whether women who have abortions — and those who help them — are committing crimes, or whether Northern Irish law makers are the real criminals by refusing to let women decide about the fate of their own bodies, no matter how they ended up pregnant. 

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Northern Irish women are British citizens. We mentioned that many of them travel to England to access abortion, but shockingly, that does not mean those abortions are covered under the British National Health Service — they aren't, and these women have to pay for their own abortions, as well as travel and accommodation while in England. There's not much the rest of us can do to influence the future of Northern Irish legislation, but if you would like to help women in Northern Ireland access abortion, you can consider donating to the Abortion Support Network, which helps them obtain safe and legal abortions in England.