Westminster was determined to advance grisly new abortion laws for Northern Ireland
from Belfast News Letter:
When last year parliament imposed a deadline to resurrect Stormont by October 21 or face abortion and same-sex marriage, MPs knew that this was in effect a deadline for traditionalists, not for reformists.
The politicians that Westminster wanted to appease tend to back liberalisation of termination and marriage laws, while the MLAs it wanted to put pressure on tend to oppose them.
The laws the government unveiled on abortion yesterday are grisly. There will be abortion on demand in the first trimester of a pregnancy, which technically is not the case in Great Britain (where there have to be medical reasons for termination, a requirement that is in effect ignored).
There is abortion up to 24 weeks “in cases where the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the regnant woman or girl, greater than the risk of terminating the pregnancy”. But that looks like a smokescreen for abortion on demand up to 24 weeks, as in GB (where a health condition applies to all pregnancies up to 24 weeks, but as mentioned above is just a formality).
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