Pro-choice groups have welcomed the High Court decision granting a 13-year-old rape victim the right to travel to Britain for an abortion. The Irish Family Planning Association's chief executive, Mr Tony O'Brien, criticised the anti-abortion groups, Youth Defence and Family and Life, for their "very gross and direct intervention in a case in which they had no place". They had "plumbed new depths of extremism and poor taste", he said.
The groups had become involved with the traveller girl's family and are understood to be funding their legal battle against her abortion. Mr O'Brien was speaking at a press conference by the recently formed Pro-Choice Campaign which is holding a protest at 3 p.m. today outside the GPO in Dublin.
The campaign's secretary, Ms Joan Gallagher, said it had almost 300 supporters including Mr O'Brien, Ms Ivana Bacik, Reid Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at TCD and Ms Ailbhe Smyth, director of the Women's Education Research and Resource Centre at UCD.
Ms Gallagher said the campaign had not made an approach to the girl's family and "would never interfere with a decision like that".
The chairwoman of the National Women's Council of Ireland, Ms Noreen Byrne, said the abortion issue should not be brushed away in the unlikely hope there would not be a third or fourth case. It was time to move forward by discussing the abortion, she said.
The decision was also welcomed by the Dublin Abortion Rights Group which seeks "free, safe and legal" abortion facilities in Ireland.