Vol. 81/No. 29      August 7, 2017

 

N. Ireland: Women advance in fight for abortion rights

 
LONDON — “It’s a day for celebration!” Goretti Horgan told those at a packed meeting of the London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign here June 29 after the U.K. government announced it would pay abortion costs for women coming to England from Northern Ireland, where the procedure is effectively illegal. Horgan is from the Alliance for Choice in Derry. The governments in Scotland and Wales said they will follow suit.

The government in London acted in response to a Belfast Court of Appeal ruling overturning a 2015 High Court decision allowing abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormality or sexual crime.

The 1967 Abortion Act made abortion widely available in Britain under the National Health Service. But the law does not apply in Northern Ireland, where women seeking abortions can face life in prison, and doctors who perform them face five years. As a result hundreds of women travel to Britain each year, forced to pay for private abortions. Women will still have to pay their own travel and accommodation costs.

The two ruling parties in Northern Ireland — the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin — both oppose a woman’s right to choose. “I would not want abortion to be as freely available here as it is in England and don’t support the extension of the 1967 Act,” Arlene Foster, head of the DUP, said in 2016. Sinn Féin backs allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest and fetal abnormality, but also opposes extension of the 1967 British law.

Several hundred women led an International Women’s Day protest in front of Belfast Town Hall March 8, calling for widening access to abortion in Northern Ireland. Support demonstrations took place in the Republic of Ireland, in Dublin, Cork and other cities.

The demonstrations in the Irish Republic also protested a 1983 amendment to their Constitution, which effectively outlaws abortion. A referendum to repeal this “Eighth Amendment” is scheduled for 2018. “Abortion is a reality in Ireland — between 1980 and 2014, at least 163,514 women registered for terminations abroad,” spokeswoman Mary Diskin said last year at the launch of the Trade Union Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment.

Repeal is winning growing support, reflecting a change in social attitudes. In 2012 tens of thousands took to the streets in protest after Savita Halappanavar died following a miscarriage. Doctors in Galway had refused Halappanavar’s repeated requests for an abortion. Three years later gay marriage was legalized in a referendum in the Irish Republic.

The British Medical Association, representing doctors and medical students throughout the U.K., voted for decriminalizing abortion. The 1967 law didn’t do this. It allowed abortions, but set a series of limitations on legal terminations, including a 24-week limit and requiring two doctors’ signatures of approval.

“Decriminalization is the removal of abortion from the penal code,” Dr. Coral Jones told British Medical Association members when she proposed the motion. “Doctors and women will no longer face the threat of imprisonment for procuring or performing abortions.” The motion does call for maintaining the 24-week time limit. It was adopted by a two-thirds majority.  
 
 
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