Why Abortion Has Been Ignored In Northern Irish Politics

Abortion has been a key issue in the Northern Ireland peace process.
The question of the extension of British abortion law to the North was crucial to Ian Paisley’s agreement to share power with Sinn Fein. This is to say that denying women reproductive rights was a condition for keeping the Stormont show on the road.

This point is routinely ignored. It is verboten in mainstream politics to draw attention to negative aspects of the Agreement. A refusal to avert your eyes from its awkward anomalies can earn you the opprobrium of those driven by a desire to carve the North up between “the two communities” and divvy the putative proceeds of peace.
In July 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown summoned Labour MP Emily Thornbury to Downing Street to issue a warning that she was putting the Good Friday Agreement at risk and opening the way for a resumption of all-out hostilities between unionists and nationalists by leading an all-party group intending the following morning to move an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which would have had the effect of extending the Act.
In tears next day as she spoke to activists in the North, Ms. Thornbury explained that she felt she had had no option but to obey: the Prime Minister from her own party had told her that she might be responsible for innocent deaths.
Brown had also counselled that if the amendment were pressed, one or more of the Northern parties would never believe a Government assurance again – the inescapable implication being that an assurance along these lines had already been given.
The evasion of the issue was on public display in New York in July 2013 when an official of the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister was left hanging in the wind as she tried to explain the North’s abortion regime at hearings of the committee overseeing the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.
It had been expected that at least a junior minister from OFMDFM would attend and field the questions. But no. Neither the DUP nor SF sent a spokesperson – remarkable when we consider these folk normally go rigid with excitement at the mere thought of an(other) exes-paid trip to the States. They let a female civil servant take the heat instead.
“During the passage of law for devolution it was guaranteed that there would be no change (in abortion law) without agreement of all parties,” she explained.
 This incoherent, obscurantist, anomalous and cowardly position still obtains. In January last, new First Minister Arlene Foster told The Guardian – although in softer terms that Paisley might have used – that although she would be willing to “look at” the situation, she still held to the Paisley view.
The extent to which this narrow attitude has infected Northern politics emerged again in a Department of Justice appeal against a High Court ruling by Mr Justice Horner last November upholding the argument of the NI Human Rights Commission that European law gives women across the 51 states of the Council of Europe a right to abortion in cases of rape, incest or fatal foetal abnormality.
Minister David Ford, himself a broadly liberal man, explained that he wanted to overturn Horner as far a rape is concerned because a lack of legal certainty on this score could lead to “abortion on demand”. He elaborated that, “The situations in which women and girls may become pregnant as a result of criminal offending behaviour extend beyond the scope of the offence of rape, or incestuous sexual activity.”
To which a reasonable person might respond - “So?”
Horner wasn’t the first Northern judge to declare abortion in defined circumstances legal. In 1993, the High Court ruled that a 14-year-old made pregnant by her boyfriend and who was threatening to abort the foetus herself, or to commit suicide, was entitled to an abortion because carrying the pregnancy to full term would render her “a physical, or mental, wreck”.
In 1994, a mentally disabled woman was given the right to an abortion because of potentially disastrous implications for her well-being of carrying the pregnancy forward.
In 1995, the courts allowed an abortion because of the disturbed state of mind of a pregnant 16-year-old in the care of the state.
These rulings have cut no ice at Stormont.
The disdainful attitude to women’s rights is reflected in the habit of anti-choice politicians, including many female politicians, to talk of “vulnerable” women in “tragic” situations who are “deserve compassion”. The notion of strong women asserting their rights doesn’t occur to them.
Left out of account entirely is the basic case for the right to choose – that when a woman with an unwanted pregnancy considers the implication of carrying the foetus to full term, considers the moral and practical arguments for this or that course, when she consults her own conscience and then makes her own choice, that should be the end of it. All else is dogmatism and waffle.
We should remember during the 100th anniversary year of the Easter Rising that this, too, is part of the fight for Irish freedom.
And keep in mind too, as far as the peace process is concerned, that a large majority of Northern Protestants as well as of Catholics want abortion rights. This is not a divisive issue at all, but a force for peace and unity.