Abortion plans for Northern Ireland abandoned due to "Peace Process"
An incredible headline in the Daily Telegraph indicates the whole present sorry state we're in here in Northern Ireland:
Pro-choice Labour MPs had been preparing to table an amendment to the Embryology Bill that would allow terminations in Northern Ireland, the only part of Britain where the procedure remains illegal.
They have scrapped the move after being privately warned by ministers that with the Stormont executive close to collapse, it could tip the province's politicians into withdrawing from negotiations.
The problem with that analysis is all four main parties in Northern Ireland believe in the continuing to deny women the freedom of choice in this most important of matters...you could even argue that such a vote may bring together the warring ethno-nationalists of the DUP and Sinn Fein, uniting against the despicably liberal, ungodly English, Scottish and Welsh (also known as, if you are a true Unionist, as our fellow British).
While abortion is one area where Northern Ireland's politicians largely concur - with both Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party opposed to legalisation - ministers fear that forcing the amendment through could undermine their attempts to broker an agreement.
As a result, pro-choice Labour MPs have been taken aside and warned not to proceed with their plan.
Yet more putrid real-politik to keep the mirage of the "Peace Process" and its resulting joke of a Toytown parliament arrive.
And this is the figure that should make all those Labour MPs thinking of bottling it tonight, think again:
Around 1,400 girls and women travel from the province each year to have a termination on the mainland, as the 1967 Act which legalised abortion in the rest of the country was never extended to Northern Ireland.
Truly shameful.
3 comments:
I heard the Home Secretary, at lunchtime, recanting the tired, old mantra about the NI Executive and parties needing to meet. Of course, the Government refuses to, ever, criticize Sinn Fein. So we have a stalemate!
The NI Government might as well be suspended, prorogued or whatever language they'd care to use.
NI ought to have the same legislation for abortion as anywhere else in the UK, by the way: Why should we have different laws?
NI has different laws because NI, like Scotland, has a different legal system.
And if Wales votes to upgrade their Parliament to full law-making powers then Wales will have a separate legal system as well.
Devolution. Independence by baby steps.
Devolution. Independence by baby steps.
I think that could be my new slogan at the top of the site.Tto me the contradiction is Unionists (in any part of the UK) voting for measures which separates them from the other three parts; at best that makes them federalists at worse, in the words of Lenin "useful idiots" for the independence cause.
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