The abortion guidelines issed by the Department of Health are erroneous and do not reflect the recommendations issued by the Health Committee last November.
The Guidelines still omit any reference to the Unborn Child, the victim who the law was intended to protect.
The Guidelines still do not clearly distinguish between the two offences of Illegal Abortion and Child Destruction and their different defences. The Defence for Illegal Abortion has been grossly overstated and the defence for Child Destruction, which is narrower that Illegal Abortion, has been completely mistated.
These errors lead to a very liberal interpretation and misunderstanding of the law.
The Health Committee endorsed the view of Dr John Keown which was presented to them by the ACLI last October in evidence. The above matters were clearly covered by Dr Keown, why then were the Department, who altered some legal mistakes pointed out by the ACLI, not made to alter the most serious errors and ommissions?
Dr John Keowns’ Statement which was endorsed by the Health Committee:
Statement on the Department of Health NI Guidance on Termination of Pregnancy from Professor John Keown.
“The opening paragraph of the Guidance states, in bold:
Within the scope of this Guidance and the law in Northern Ireland, each Health & Social Services Trust must ensure that its patients have access to termination of pregnancy services
This is seriously misleading, not least as it invites the exception to swallow the rule.
The starting point of the Guidance should have been a clear statement of the illegality of abortion in Northern Ireland: that it is a crime punishable by a maximum of life imprisonment to use any means with intent to procure miscarriage, and an offence to supply means knowing that they are to be used with that intent. The Guidance should then have recalled the central if not sole purpose of this prohibition: the protection of the unborn child, a purpose which has informed the law against abortion for over 700 years. Only when the rule had been clearly stated should the scope of the exception have been considered. Similarly, the Guidance should accurately have stated the law against child destruction and its central purpose, the protection of a child “capable of being born alive”, and then have noted the narrowness of the exception to this prohibition: such a child may be intentionally destroyed for the purpose only of saving the life of the mother. (It is remarkable that paragraph 2.6 of the Guidance, which purports to quote the statute, misstates this exception by omitting the important word “only”.)
Would one begin Guidance on the law of theft, which recognises that in exceptional circumstances A may lawfully appropriate B’s property, by saying that “within the scope of law of theft, the government should ensure that everyone has access to everyone else’s property”? Further, just because there may be a defence to abortion in exceptional circumstances does not mean that anyone (doctor or government) is under a duty to provide abortion in those circumstances, any more than anyone is under a duty to provide citizens with weapons for use in self-defence. Moreover, the government has a discretion as to how to allocate its healthcare resources: it is perfectly entitled to prioritise medical procedures which do not involve the destruction of life.”
Professor John Keown MA DPhil PhD
Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Georgetown University
About Professor John Keown
John Keown is the Rose F Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics at Georgetown University, Washington DC. He graduated in law from Cambridge in 1984 and obtained a DPhil from Oxford in 1986 for a thesis on the historical development of the law on abortion. After being called to the Bar of England and Wales (Middle Temple) in 1986 he was appointed to a lectureship in medical law at the University of Leicester. In 1993 he was appointed to a lectureship in the law and ethics of medicine at Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Queens’ College and Churchill College. In 2003 he assumed the Rose F Kennedy Chair at Georgetown.
His many publications include three books, all published by Cambridge University Press: Abortion, Doctors and the Law (1988); Euthanasia Examined: Ethical, Clinical and Legal Perspectives (1995) and Euthanasia, Ethics and Public Policy: An Argument Against Legalisation (2002)
