Parties which claim to uphold human rights have abandoned women
It was quite the “manel” on display last week when the leaders of the North’s main Christian churches, and their Council of Churches, gathered in the Church of Ireland’s cathedral in Armagh to mark the centenary of partition. Most quoted in the extensive news coverage was the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin, who said he had to “face the difficult truth that, perhaps, we in the churches could have done more . . . to bring healing and peace to our divided and wounded communities”.
The last time I recall these men joining forces to opine was in 2019 when they wrote to political leaders at Stormont urging them to recall the then suspended executive and stop the decriminalisation of abortion via legislation voted in at Westminster.
By coincidence the church service took place on the second anniversary of the North’s getting a British pro-choice law which is one of the most humane in Europe. But feminists marked the occasion with a protest in Belfast, because the law is not being implemented. One placard read, “Girls just want to have fun-damental human rights.”
The North’s Minister for Health, Robert Swan of the UUP, has not commissioned the abortion services required under the law and, throughout the pandemic, women still had to travel for abortions or go through with crisis pregnancies or take unregulated pills. Earlier this month, Belfast’s high court ruled in a case brought by the NI Human Rights Commission that the British secretary of state had failed to comply with his duty to ensure that abortion services were provided “expeditiously”.
Foetal abnormality
While the church service was taking place in Armagh, Stormont’s health committee voted in favour of a DUP Bill which would effectively deny women their legal rights in some of the worst situations imaginable. The Bill seeks to amend the law to remove the right to abortion in cases of “severe foetal abnormality”. The law currently allows for abortion after 24 weeks’ gestation in such cases, as well as if there is a fatal foetal abnormality. In reality, tests may only indicate the presence of such abnormalities at about 20 weeks, and medical diagnosis of the difference between severe and fatal is not always possible.
The amendment would force some women to rush an inevitably fraught decision in order to have a termination in the North. Others would have to travel to England. Some, unable to do either, would be forced to carry their pregnancy to full term, or to the point when the foetus dies in their womb.
The Bill’s author is the current First Minister, Paul Givan, who believes that life begins at conception. The DUP has fought to maintain that particular border in the Irish Sea. The two DUP committee members voted for the Bill. The UUP’s one committee member also supported it, dashing any hopes that the party’s new leader, Doug Beattie, would stand up for women’s reproductive rights. The only two members who voted against the Bill were from People Before Profit and Alliance. The SDLP’s one member and Sinn Féin’s three members all abstained. (read the full article at the Irish Times)