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NIRELAND-ABORTION Jul-24-2008 (500 words) xxxi
Politicians oppose extension of abortion act to Northern Ireland
By Simon Caldwell
Catholic News Service
LONDON (CNS) -- Politicians and lobbyists who oppose abortion in Northern Ireland have said they will resist attempts to extend Britain's abortion laws to the country.
"This attempt to impose abortion on Northern Ireland is extremist, anti-democratic and arrogant," said Betty Gibson, chairwoman of the Northern Ireland branch of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.
"The leaders of all four major political parties and the four main churches right across Northern Ireland's traditional divide have written to the government and all Westminster members of Parliament calling on them to allow the issue of abortion law to be decided by the province's devolved government," said Gibson, a Catholic, in a July 23 statement.
Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom where the 1967 Abortion Act, which made abortion legal in Britain, does not apply because elected representatives of the Catholic and Protestant communities always have insisted that they do not want the practice legalized.
But on July 22, English politicians proposed an amendment to the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill to extend the act to Northern Ireland. It will be debated by the House of Commons in the fall and is expected to pass into law soon afterward.
The amendment would give women in the province the right to free abortions on demand with funding from the National Health Service within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Currently in Northern Ireland, abortion is allowed only if there is evidence of a threat to the mother's life, but about 1,000 women a year travel to the British mainland each year to pay to have the procedure privately.
Diane Abbott, one of the politicians sponsoring the amendment, told the BBC July 23 that "Northern Ireland women are effectively second-class citizens" because of their lack of abortion rights.
"I think it is not unreasonable that the British Parliament should say that all citizens in the British Isles should have the same rights," she said.
Abbott claimed there was a "very good chance" of the proposal succeeding because of the many members of Parliament who support the legalization of abortion.
However, representatives of the main political parties oppose the move.
Jeffrey Donaldson, a member of the Democratic Unionist Party, a Protestant party, told the BBC that the move was "dangerous and divisive."
"The reason why the law is different in Northern Ireland is because that is what the people of Northern Ireland want," he said. "We will be vigorously opposing any move to override the wishes of the people of Northern Ireland."
Mark Durkin, leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, the largest and most moderate Catholic party, said that "with full democratic conscience, will do everything we can to oppose these plans and will do so on behalf of the people who have elected us and on behalf of those human beings who can be saved if we can effectively curb and hold back the extension of this act."
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