Too bad for her she lived in Belfast
Northern Ireland as a little outpost of Catholic woman-hatred, even though it’s officially not Catholic as it’s part of the UK.
A woman bought drugs for a home abortion after failing to raise enough money to travel to England for a termination, a court heard on Monday.
A barrister for the woman told Belfast Crown Court that had his client lived in any other region of the UK, she would “not have found herself before the courts”.
She was in court because she was on trial, because Northern Ireland isn’t as free of Catholic dogma as it might like you to think.
She bought drugs online and then miscarried, in July 2014. She was 19 then.
The male foetus, which was between 10 and 12 weeks, was later found in the bin of a house she shared with two other people.
She appeared in court today where she pleaded guilty to two charges – namely procuring her own abortion by using a poison, and of supplying a poison with intent to procure a miscarriage.
Handing the woman a three-month prison sentence, which was suspended for two years, Judge David McFarland spoke of the difference in legislation surrounding abortion in Northern Ireland, compared to England, Scotland and Wales.
A very large difference, clearly.
Crown prosecutor Kate McKay said that on July 20, 2014 police were contacted by the woman’s housemates and were made aware that she had bought drugs online which had induced a miscarriage on July 12.
When officers arrived at the rented accommodation in south Belfast, they conducted a search and located various items – including a foetus which was located in a black bag in the household bin.
A subsequent post-mortem confirmed that the male foetus was between ten to 12 weeks and was the woman’s biological son.
Mrs McKay said that when the woman moved into the house in May 2014, she told her two housemates that she was pregnant but that she was trying to raise the money to travel to England for a termination.
She clearly wasn’t expecting them to call the police.
The day after she miscarried
her housemates found both blood-stained items and the foetus in the bin. One housemate described the foetus as a “wee baby” around four inches long.
Mrs McKay said at this point the housemates were in a dilemma about what to do and were “taken aback by the seemingly blase attitude” adopted by the woman. Around a week later, they contacted the PSNI.
That will teach her to be “blasé” about terminating a pregnancy at ten weeks. Good thing she had roommates to rat her out.
Acknowledging that as a UK citizen the woman could legally have travelled to England for a termination, Judge McFarland said that the advice given by the clinic “without knowledge of her background and details was perhaps inappropriate”.
He also said that while there are agencies in Northern Ireland that give advice on such issues “unfortunately they are part of a polarised debate that can be part of a more toxic debate”.
What a nasty mess.
And they were so terribly concerned that they waited a week to contact police.
What I mean is, seems like they were doing the conservative version of virtue signalling. They tried to push her to repent after she did something they disapproved of, and then when she didn’t act the way they expected, they decided she was too nasty and sinful and had to be punished.
If a child had actually been harmed, instead of a barely developing fetus, it wouldn’t take a person a week to decide the authorities needed to know. If they’d come home to find their flat burgled, they would call the police immediately.
As their actions go, I don’t think they really believed it was a crime. I think they believed it was a *sin*. And since the sinner wouldn’t repent on their own and make them feel virtuous as they brought her to Jesus, they had to feel virtuous another way, by turning her in.
While the influence of the Catholic Church needs to be taken into account the situation in Northern Ireland is far more complex than than you suggest. NI is a sort of dual-theocracy. Members of the NI parliament who wish to be part of government must declare themselves to be either Nationalist or Unionist – in practice code for Catholic or Protestant – and the NI cabinet balanced to make it contain equal numbers of each. The NI parliament is about 52% Unionist (Protestant), 40% Nationalist (Catholic) with the other 8% undeclared. But it gets a bit confusing because, for instance, the Progressive Unionist Party is non-sectarian and its members do not declare themselves to be Unionist.
While the Nationalists in the NI parliament would no doubt oppose repealing Section 58 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, the Unionists have a built in majority and could easily push through such legistlation if they wished. But they do not wish because most Unionist politicians are fundamentalists of some stripe and are also anti-abortion.
As I understand it the situation is as follows: Section 58 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 has not been repealed anywhere in the UK, however the Abortion Act 1967 takes precedence over it which has the same effect. But the Abortion Act was considered “religiously sensitive” and so, while it is part of English, Welsh and Scottish law, Northern Ireland was deliberately exempted from its provisions.
It gets even more bizarre than that, however. Section 58 of the Offences against the Person Act has been declared to contrary to the Human Rights Act by the UK Supreme Court. An outsider might be forgiven for thinking this would render it null and void, but it doesn’t. What this ruling does do is to make the issue the responsibility of the Westminter parliament, since, according to the Good Friday agreement this ruling gives the that parliament the right to strike down the legislation. This has not been done, presumably in deference to religious sensitivities, although politicians would probably plead lack of parliamentary time.
After 30 years of sectarian violence in Ulster in the last century, it is understandable that politicians might want to tiptoe around religious issues. But there is a price to be paid for this and it is people like this unfortunate young lady who end up paying the price.
So they didn’t charge her with the one thing she actually did wrong, namely the improper disposal of medical waste… bizarre.
Okay, this second charge just boggles my mind. I mean, as vile and obscene as the first charge is, I can at least see the application of the law. But she did not ‘supply’ anything; someone else supplied her with it. If I were to buy a personal-use dosage of crack cocaine in Northern Ireland, would I also be charged with selling it to myself once I used it?
The fact that they included that second charge, even above and beyond the situation itself, makes it so painfully clear that this is just about punishing women for exercising control over their own bodies.
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