The ashes were delivered by courier
A woman in Ireland who was forced to choose between carrying her foetus to term, knowing it would not survive, or seeking an abortion abroad was subjected to discrimination and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as a result of Ireland’s legal prohibition of abortion, United Nations experts have found.
The independent experts, from the Geneva-based Human Rights Committee, issued their findings after considering a complaint by the woman, AM, who was told in November 2011 when she was in the 21st week of pregnancy that her foetus had congenital defects, which meant it would die in the womb or shortly after birth.
This meant she had to choose “between continuing her non-viable pregnancy or travelling to another country while carrying a dying foetus, at personal expense and separated from the support of her family, and to return while not fully recovered,” the Committee said in a press release.
AM decided to travel to the United Kingdom for a termination and returned 12 hours after the procedure as she could not afford to stay longer. The UK hospital did not provide any options regarding the foetus’s remains and she had to leave them behind. The ashes were unexpectedly delivered to her three weeks later by courier.
In Ireland, she was denied the bereavement counselling and medical care available to women who miscarry. Such differential treatment, the Committee noted, failed to take into account her medical needs and socio-economic circumstances and constituted discrimination.
And she couldn’t even get adequate information about what to do.
Ireland’s Abortion Information Act allows healthcare providers to give patients information about abortion, including the circumstances under which abortion services can be available in Ireland or overseas. But under the law they are prohibited from, and could be sanctioned for, behaviour that could be interpreted as advocating or promoting the termination of pregnancy. This, according to the Committee, has a chilling effect on health-care providers, who struggle to distinguish “supporting” a woman who has decided to terminate a pregnancy from “advocating” or “promoting” abortion.
All this because God hates women.
These legalisms end up with the woman being abandoned in her great distress and shunned. This system is cruel and ultimately sadistic.
There’s so much hatred and hypocrisy exposed in this sentence, it should be written in giant flaming letters on the lawn of every church and politician in Ireland.
If they truly believed that the fetus was a ‘person’; if they actually bought into their own malarky about ensoulment and being known in the womb by God and all that thrice-accursed bullshit, they wouldn’t so much as fucking hesitate to step forward. I’m sure they could have been awful in other ways, pushing her to ‘repent’ and so forth. But they certainly would not have denied that she was a mother grieving the loss of a child (which, in this particular abortion, she was).
But that would entail actually looking at the mother as a person, rather than, you know–a woman.
Yes. I sat and stared at that sentence for quite awhile, trying to plumb its depths.