The Northern Ireland High Court has ordered the recall of health guidelines which would have potentially undermined doctors’ rights to conscientiously object to assisting in abortions.
Pro-life activists in the North said that the guidelines said would have undermined and effectively overturned the province’s pro-life laws.
Lord Justice Girvan found that the guidelines failed to deal properly with conscientious objection to abortion and counseling on abortion.
The judge said the guidelines were open to misinterpretation, saying the language was “ambiguous” and left doctors and staff unclear as to what was expected of them. The judge said the guidelines needed to be absolutely clear, otherwise they represented “a trap to the unwary.”
Pro-life groups had argued that it was wrong for the Department of Health to expect health care workers to give “non-directive counselling” to women considering abortion.
Liam Gibson, Northern Ireland officer for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) said, “We hope that the department will now take seriously many of the concerns which were largely disregarded when the guidelines were being drafted.”
“It is simply extraordinary that a government department should have issued guidance on criminal legislation and not have once mentioned the victim of the crime,” Gibson said.
That Britain’s very liberal 1967 Abortion Act does not apply in Northern Ireland continues to irritate abortion advocates who campaign ceaselessly to overturn the province’s law. Opposition in the province to abortion remains strong, however, from both the public and most political parties, including the Social Democrats, Labour Party, Sinn Féin, the Ulster Unionist Party and the Democratic Unionist Party as well as the Catholic Church and evangelical Protestant groups.
In October 2007 a motion was passed in the Northern Ireland Assembly, tabled by MLAs Jeffrey Donaldson and Iris Robinson, that rejected the draft guidelines. Nevertheless, the status of the guidelines remained ambiguous for a year while pro-life groups launched their legal challenge.
