Sir, – Niall Behan of the Irish Family Planning Association writes that the Supreme Court’s distinction between abortion to save the life (of the mother, presumably) and abortion to protect the health “is unworkable in practice” (Opinion, January 17th). But what could be more clear?
In cases such as ectopic pregnancy, where the mother’s life is at risk, hospitals can and do operate on the mother, even if that operation results in the incidental death of the unborn child. Mr Behan cannot point to a single instance of a doctor being disciplined for such a decision in the Republic of Ireland. The introduction of abortion in Britain in 1967 – including the proviso that abortion should be permissible in the case of “injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman” (Abortion Act, 1967, section 1 (1)(a)) – resulted in 2010 in 196,109 abortions in England and Wales, and 99.96 per cent of terminations under the above section were performed because of a “risk to the woman’s mental health”.
Those shocking statistics are the real “long shadow” that is cast over the work on the expert group considering the European Court of Human Rights judgment. – Yours, etc,