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.