Abortion by Stealth Foiled in Northern Ireland

15.07.2010     According to Catholic Online, potentially pro-abortion guidelines were recently withdrawn by the Department of Health in Northern Ireland. These guidelines, which explain the circumstances in which abortions can be procured in Northern Ireland, arguably would have allowed abortions in areas that the law does not permit and potentially would have forced hospitals to provide abortions in a country that bans all abortions except where it would preserve the life of the mother.

Previously in November of 2009, the Belfast High Court ruled that similar guidelines were not to be allowed since they violated the law against abortion in Northern Ireland. The Department of Health sought to keep these guidelines by removing two sections dealing with conscientious objections and counseling.  Lord Justice Girvan rejected this request, yet the Department basically ignored the court ruling and reproduced the same basic guidelines minus those two sections in February.

According to Liam Gibson of SPUC (UK's Society for the Protection of Unborn Children), "Sadly, this is the way the department has behaved all along. It has disregarded public opinion, the will of the Assembly, the Stormont health committee and even the high court, in order to pursue an agenda of widening the scope for abortion in Northern Ireland." Following this, SPUC, the same group who challenged the original guidelines, pressed the courts again. However, this time the Department finally backed down once the fortitude of the pro-life movement sufficiently exposed them.

This tactic follows the pattern of abortion advocates at the UN.  If the legitimate authority on the law that exists is not an effective route for promoting abortion, then abortion rights groups will often try to push abortion by stealth in some way that avoids the normal legal process and, often times, the attention of those who cover issues. For example, in the UN, since such groups cannot get abortion written into treaties legitimately, they try to re-interpret abortion into them, as if it were already there, through the work of non-answerable committees to whom signatory countries report to on their adherence to a treaty.