Jover two years ago I was in a pub in Belfast celebrating the decriminalization of abortion in Northern Ireland. This heady day of vindication has come after decades of campaigning by countless activists. There was a sense of relief, not only for the activists, but for those who suffered the trauma of being forced to travel to access basic health care which was readily available throughout the rest of the UK. The end was finally in sight. Our basic human rights would be enshrined in law, although it took Westminster to step in where our own government would not. Finally, free, safe, legal and local abortion was imminent.
But that day’s promises have yet to materialize. For two years, the Northern Ireland Department of Health did not order abortion services. Access to abortion in Northern Ireland remains sketchy, with much of the support provided by charities like Informing Choices NI. When they had to stop their work due to excessive pressure on resources, access to abortion became virtually non-existent in Northern Ireland again. In the midst of a once-in-a-generation pandemic, those in need of abortions – British citizens and residents alike – are still being forced, at personal and financial cost, to travel to Britain for treatment.
The delay in providing basic health care is infuriating and insulting to all those who are forced to travel when the law unequivocally stipulates that they have the right to have an abortion at home. It is especially painful the week of the ninth anniversary of the case of Savita Halappanavar, who died of a septic miscarriage after being denied an abortion in Galway (it was six years after this terrible incident that Ireland finally changed its own draconian abortion laws).
So it is with understandable frustration and impatience that reproductive rights advocates will welcome this week’s development that Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis could bypass both the NI Health Department and the executive of Northern Ireland, and working directly with health trusts to implement abortion care. It took a High Court ruling that Lewis failed in his duty to provide comprehensive abortion services in Northern Ireland to get us to this point.
It should never have come to this.
It is almost unfair that the charge of dereliction of duty is brought against Lewis, who, as he points out, is the only person in this sad saga to take action to uphold the law. In July this year, he ordered the Northern Ireland executive to implement abortion services no later than March 2022. This is just two months before the elections to the National Assembly. Northern Ireland – something that will surely weigh on Health Minister Robin Swann of the Ulster Unionist Party. (UUP). He has refused to order services so far and might fear pressure from the right wing of unionism if he submits to it.
Amid obstruction by the Department of Health and obfuscation by the NI executive, there are arguably many more culprits in general, namely the Evangelical Christian DUP, the largest party in Northern Ireland . They, along with some within the UUP and conservative Catholic currents within Sinn Féin and the SDLP, continued to block the realization of all reproductive rights in Northern Ireland, prolonging the indignity of every pregnant person. living here.
DUP Premier Paul Givan (who vowed to resist Lewis’s commissioning order in July) recently introduced a bill banning abortion on non-fatal disability, backed by colleagues DUP and UUP within the health committee. The SDLP and Sinn Féin (whose party policies only support abortion in cases of fatal fetal anomaly, which they admit does not respect human rights) have abstained.
It is a lost irony that the political ideology aimed at maintaining Northern Ireland’s place in the Union is one which denies its citizens the same rights accorded to the rest of the UK.
Since parliament extended the right to abortion to Northern Ireland in October 2019, union leaders have complained about a lack of respect for devolution. Separately, the government has said it will introduce Irish language legislation from Westminster if the NI executive continues to avoid doing so. Many will not welcome these latest developments, but parliament and Lewis’ hands are linked: if Northern Ireland does not act, Westminster must.
After all, isn’t parliament sovereign? Isn’t this precisely what the leaders of trade unionism are defending? What does “the union” really mean for the unionist parties here?
Politically, the timing of Lewis’s last intervention is charged. The ongoing disputes over the NI protocol have exposed loopholes between the Conservative Party and Unionist parties. They vehemently oppose an international treaty negotiated with the EU by the Conservative government and adopted by parliament. They say it compromises Northern Ireland’s place in the union and the identity of the British living in the country.
To what extent is it possible for trade union leaders to plead for Northern Ireland’s steadfast place in the Union, threatening already fragile Brexit deals negotiated by a Conservative government they have repeatedly supported, when they refuse to grant the inhabitants of NI the same rights as those of Birmingham, Edinburgh or Cardiff? How long will their demands be tolerated in Westminster as their backward views – not supported by the majority of the NI population, including many trade unionists – threaten the Tories’ grand Brexit experiment?
In his letter written to Prime Minister Givan and his deputy, Michelle O’Neill (which was leaked to The Guardian), Lewis states that it is the duty of elected officials to uphold the law, whether or not they are in agree with it. This is the great contradiction within political unionism: they want respect for the sovereignty of the UK and parliament, and respect for their British identity in the north, but they want it without the protection of basic human rights to abortion, equal marriage and minority languages which are part of modern British law and culture.
