Imposing abortion on Northern Ireland

IMPOSING ABORTION

on Northern Ireland

by LIAM GIBSON

PASSAGE OF THE NORTHERN IRELAND (EXECUTIVE FORMATION) ACT 2019 Since 1967, Northern Ireland has been the only part of the United Kingdom where abortion has remained presumptively unlawful. While abortion claims over 500 lives daily in the rest of the UK, opposition from the people of Northern Ireland has prevented all attempts to liberalise the Province’s pro-life laws.

In the closing days of Theresa May’s government, however, Karen Bradley, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland introduced fast-track legislation in the House of Commons aimed at postponing assembly elections and extending the time for talks on the restoration of the Stormont Executive. What followed was one of the most shocking abuses of the parliamentary process in modern times as the bill was hijacked by pro-abortion MPs to legalise abortion and same-sex “marriage” in Northern Ireland. In fact, if implemented, the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Act 2019 will cost the lives of tens of thousands more unborn children by ushering into the Province one of the most extreme abortion regimes in Europe. It will also advance the decriminalisation of abortion across the whole of the United Kingdom and may well have far-reaching consequences for the rule of law.

For over 50 years the law in Northern Ireland (primarily sections 58 and 59 of the Off ences Against the Person Act 1861) has saved more than 100,000 babies.1 For the last nine years, responsibility for abortion law lay with the Province’s assembly. By seizing control over an issue reserved to Stormont, Westminster PRO-LIFE ACTION

went back on its commitment to protect devolution, a central principle of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. This agreement is not simply a deal between opposing political factions in Northern Ireland. It is an international treaty which the UK guaranteed to respect. While paying lip service to the restoration of self-government, the use of raw political power to impose abortion and same-sex “marriage” on Northern Ireland has violated the devolution settlement and seriously undermined the Good Friday Agreement. It now seems that the people of the Province will no longer be permitted to maintain laws which don’t meet with the approval of politicians from England, Scotland and Wales.

The Constitution Committee of the House of Lords had previously warned that the fast-track procedure was unsuitable for Northern Ireland legislation due to the lack of proper scrutiny. In a report published 10 July, the day after MPs voted by 332 to 99 to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland, the committee reiterated this concern saying:

The political stalemate in Northern Ireland has led to an absence of a functioning Executive and a democratic deficit. Fast-tracking bills relating to Northern Ireland reduces further the scrutiny these measures should receive. Routinely fast-tracking in this way is unacceptable, unsustainable and should only be used for urgent matters.2

The fast-track procedure allows a government to pass in a matter of days, legislation that would ordinarily take months. Normally, it is not used to deal with contentious issues, such as abortion. However, the inclusion of abortion in this legislation could not have happened without the government allowing its Bill to be hijacked.

When, on 4 July, the Leader of the Commons, Mel Stride, virtually invited amendments on abortion and same-sex marriage, it gave the Speaker the green light to ignore constitutional conventions and select them for debate, even though such matters had no relevance to the scope of the Bill. In the vote that followed each of the 11 MPs from Northern Ireland who take their seats opposed the introduction of abortion to the Province. Regardless of this and despite admitting that the amendments on same-sex marriage and abortion were so poorly drafted that they could not function legally, the government took on the responsibility for redrafting these proposals in a way

that could be implemented. Ministers even met with pro-abortion MPs from the Labour Party to discuss how decriminalisation could be carried out.

Section 9 of the Act strikes down the current law without replacing it with any new legislation. Abortion, therefore, for any reason, will be considered lawful at least until the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy. However, the level of ambiguity surrounding the Act is so great that the upper limit may actually be 28 weeks. There will also be an immediate moratorium on the investigation and prosecution of all abortions. Self-induced abortions, sex-selective abortions and even an abortion carried out without the consent of the pregnant woman will not be regarded as a criminal off ence. After fi ve months without any law on abortion, the Secretary of State will present to Parliament a statutory instrument which will create regulations on how and where abortions can be performed. Until then, in the words of one prominent QC, a state of “legal chaos” will exist. Political instability, in both Belfast and Westminster, however, means that there is a risk that this chaos could last longer than expected.

Only the restoration of devolved government before 22 October can prevent this from happening. At present, that seems unlikely as the Stormont coalition collapsed in 2016 when Sinn Féin pulled out of government. Two of the conditions the party has set for its return is the introduction of abortion and samesex “marriage”. The terms of the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Act means that the party can achieve these two goals simply by preventing an early return to power-sharing.

ABORTION IS NOT A HUMAN RIGHT The pretext for all this was a report issued last year by the United Nation’s compliance committee on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.3 This report claimed that Northern Ireland’s abortion laws violated human rights standards. But abortion is not a human right. It is an act of lethal violence directed at an unborn child and is never justifi ed. No UN convention has ever recognised access to abortion as a human right. Nor does a UN committee have the authority to compel a state to change its abortion laws.

The Act received Royal Assent on 24 July, just a little over two weeks after its Second Reading. That such an extreme law was passed so quickly and with such blatant disregard for constitutional conventions marks a worrying development in the UK. When the legislative process becomes nothing more than the arbitrary exercise of political power, the rule of law is abandoned.4 It seems that whatever a majority of politicians is prepared to force through Parliament could now become law even if it is unconstitutional. This has grave implications for all aspects of Christian life. The current abortion law in Britain will soon be more restrictive than the new regime in Northern Ireland, so decriminalisation could soon be implemented across the whole of the UK.

The pro-life movement in Northern Ireland has mobilised to protest against the imposition of the new regime. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children has gathered thousands of names for a petition calling on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to respect the right of the people of Northern Ireland to maintain laws which protect our children from abortion. If the unconstitutional methods used to enact this law are tolerated then freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and the right to educate children in Christian moral values could quickly come under fi re in a society where political might makes right.

Endnotes:

1. “How the 100,000 fi gure was esti mated and verifi ed” htt ps://bothlivesmatt er. org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/BLM-STEP-BY-STEP-EXPLANATION-002. pdf [Accessed 23 August 2019]. 2. Consti tuti on Committ ee, The Legislati ve Process: The Passage of Bills Through Parliament (24th Report, Session 2017–19, HL Paper 393), para 39, htt ps:// publicati ons.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldconst/393/39302.htm [Accessed 23 August 2019]. 3. Report of the Inquiry concerning the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland under arti cle 8 of the Opti onal Protocol to the Conventi on on the Eliminati on of All Forms of Discriminati on against Women, March 2018. 4. “But in order that the voliti on of what is commanded may have the nature of law, it needs to be in accord with some rule of reason. And in this sense is to be understood the saying that the will of the sovereign has the force of law; or otherwise the sovereign’s will would savour of lawlessness rather than of law” Cf. Summa theologica, Ia IIae, q.90, a.1 ad 3. PRO-LIFE ACTION