WHY PRECIOUS LIFE DOES NOT WELCOME LATEST DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH GUIDELINES ON ABORTION IN NORTHERN IRELAND
Following a further examination of the ‘abortion guidelines’ issued by the Department of Health on Friday 25th April 2016, Precious Life has issued the following statement explaining why it does not welcome the guidelines and is calling on the Northern Ireland Assembly to reject the guidelines.
On BBC Radio Ulster’s Talkback programme on Tuesday 5th April 2016, Precious Life was concerned to hear from Peter Bowles, a solicitor in Northern Ireland who was involved in the judicial review leading to the publication of these latest guidelines, that he did not believe the “public interest was served” in this week’s sentencing of a woman who aborted her ten to twelve week unborn baby boy and dumped him in a bin in her flat in Belfast in July 2014.
Rather, Mr Bowles made the ridiculous claim that the prosecution and sentencing of the young woman was due to the “class system” and “hierarchy” which meant she was “subjected to the criminal law because she cannot afford the flight to Liverpool or London”. This is redolent of Amnesty International’s Patrick Corrigan’s laughable claim that the woman was criminalised “for being poor”.
Mr Bowles disagreed with the decision made by the Public Prosecution Service that the public interest requirement was met in this case. He could not comprehend that the people of Northern Ireland would be “morally invested” in the horrific discovery of an aborted baby boy in a bin and explained that this was why “you don’t hear about cases in this area”.
We are very concerned to find that Mr Bowles’ chilling disregard for the aborted baby who was found in a bin and his ‘sweep it under the carpet and move on’ approach to this very serious crime is a shameful reflection of the mindset of those who penned these latest guidelines.
The Guidelines
Abortion is a criminal offence in Northern Ireland, governed by sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and section 25 of the Criminal Justice Act (NI) 1945. The core purpose of this law is the protection of the unborn child.
Ever since the Family Planning Association of Northern Ireland brought a judicial review in 2001 against the Department of Health’s “failure to provide advice and guidance” on “the availability and provision of” abortion, many within the healthcare profession have been complaining about the so-called ‘uncertainty’, ‘lack of clarity’ and the ‘chilling effect’ of our law and the oppressive ‘climate of fear’ pervading our hospitals; the fear of getting caught breaking the law.
The latest guidelines issued by the Department of Health may, at first glance, appear innocuous. After all, they are ‘only guidelines’. Indeed, on the fourth page of the guidelines, it is “emphasise[d]” that “this guidance cannot, and does not, make any change to the law of Northern Ireland.”
But a change in the law is not necessary for there to be a change in the interpretation of the law. Contained within these latest guidelines are carefully crafted words which pose a lethal threat to unborn children in Northern Ireland.
Firstly, and most frustratingly, the Department of Health failed, just as it did in the previous draft guidelines, to outline the law in its proper criminal context and wrongly presented the defence to the criminal offence of abortion, that the act which caused the death of the unborn child was necessary to save the life of the woman or to prevent a “real and serious adverse effect on her physical or mental health”, as an automatic ‘legal ground’ for abortion.
Secondly, in a desperate attempt to appease those in the healthcare profession who are tired of looking over their shoulders and want to be freed from the shackles of threatened prosecution, the Department of Health has dared to ‘sanitise’ the deliberate killing of an unborn child by outrageously presenting it as simply another ‘health and social care service’.
These guidelines goad the dangerous misconceived idea that healthcare professionals can take the law into their own hands. According to these guidelines, it is the healthcare professional who decides, in the privacy of a clinical setting, whether a “termination of pregnancy” can be “lawfully offered”. If a healthcare professional knows or believes that a colleague has committed an “unlawful termination of pregnancy”, whatever that may be, he or she is under a duty to report this to the police. However, the healthcare professional “need not give that information if they have a reasonable excuse for not doing so”; i.e. protecting patient confidentiality. The healthcare professionals who are tired of looking over their shoulders and want to be freed from the shackles of threatened prosecution can breathe a sigh of relief.
A legal and moral duty to protect both patients
The healthcare profession has a legal and moral duty to protect both patients: the pregnant woman and her unborn child. There is a legal and moral difference between directly targeting the life of the unborn child and directly treating or removing a maternal pathological source and the unborn child dies as an unintended consequence of that intervention. Unfortunately, these guidelines have refused to acknowledge such a distinction.
The guidelines state that “the law in Northern Ireland does not allow interventions that have as their sole purpose the ending of the life of the fetus.” But as Dr Anthony Levatino, a former abortionist in the United States, explains, “every lawyer knows that every single word has meaning”. The word “sole” is not meaningless. According to these guidelines, the law would not permit a doctor to end the life of an unborn child with the sole purpose of ending the life of that child. But if a doctor induced labour and ‘delivered’ a fourteen-week old unborn child, claiming that the mother’s mental health was at risk, no one would dare question that doctor’s ‘good faith’, despite that no research evidence indicates that abortion is an effective treatment for any mental health disorder or distress, but rather, evidence indicates that abortion carries an increased risk of mental health problems, including suicidality.
Precious Life is very concerned that these guidelines could lead to a very liberal interpretation of the law and lead to the deliberate abortion of unborn children in Northern Ireland.
Preparing a briefing paper
We expect our healthcare professionals to save lives, not wilfully destroy lives. We expect our healthcare professionals to respect and care for both mother and baby equally. For these reasons and for other concerns we will discuss with our legal advisers this week, Precious Life does not accept these guidelines and is in the process of preparing a briefing paper to pass on to the Northern Ireland Executive.