A pro-life lobby group has reiterated its call for the Constitution to be changed to ensure that life is protected from conception just 24 hours after Ireland’s abortion laws were slammed by Europe’s supreme court.
In a judgment last Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights found that a sick woman’s human rights were breached when she was forced to seek an abortion in the UK.
Gift of Life said it wrote to the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader in November asking them to start a parliamentary debate to change the Constitution.
The pro-life group wants to entrench the words “from conception” to the right to life in the Constitution to make it very difficult for abortion to ever be made legal at some point in the future.
Although there is political consensus against abortion, there are dissenting voices as to whether the Constitution has to be changed.
The Irish case has rekindled the abortion debate even though the ECHR judgment did not contest the general abortion ban in Ireland.
The case revolves around a woman who underwent chemo-therapy treatment for cancer. The cancer was in remission when she got pregnant. Before realising she was pregnant, the woman had undergone some tests contraindicated during pregnancy. She feared the tests would have harmed the foetus and the cancer would reappear if she carried the pregnancy to term.
Although abortion in Ireland is legal if the mother’s life is in danger, the woman claimed she was unable to obtain proper medical advice, which forced her to have an abortion in the UK.
The court said the Irish authorities failed to comply with their obligation to secure the woman’s “effective respect for her private life” because of the absence of a regulatory regime providing “an accessible and effective procedure” by which the woman could have established whether she qualified for a lawful abortion.
The judgment will probably lead to a change in legislation to ensure abortions that are permitted on paper will be truly accessible to women.
In Malta, abortion is a criminal act that punishes the woman and the doctor. There are no legal provisions that permit abortion if the woman’s life is in danger.