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Abortion Law (Northern Ireland)

I have great affection for the hon. Gentleman, but his argument blows apart if localism is taken down to its purist level, because the local decision of the individual woman herself is the one that we are defending. Women in Northern Ireland have been waiting for more than 40 years to secure the same sexual and reproductive rights as women in the rest of the UK. The Abortion Act 1967 allows women in England, Scotland and Wales access to safe, legal abortion services. For women in Northern Ireland the situation is drastically different, because Victorian legislation—the Offences Against the Person Act 1861—is still in place there, which is a scandal. That means that women are only able to access abortion if their lives are in danger or if continuing the pregnancy would lead to severe and permanent harm. The penalty for obtaining an illegal abortion is imprisonment for life. Northern Ireland women are living under a Victorian law created at a time of workhouses and child labour. Women were not even allowed the right to vote at that point, yet this law continues to govern the health and lives of women in Northern Ireland. The law in Northern Ireland is so restrictive that even a 14-year-old girl who had been raped or was a victim of incest, or even both, because that can happen, would not be able to access an abortion just because she had been raped or was a victim of incest. It is one of the most restrictive laws on abortion in Europe. I have huge respect for people who raise moral issues in this Chamber and elsewhere, but it defies my comprehension that somebody could say to a 14-year-old girl who had been raped that they would, because of their particular religious beliefs and their own particular morality, force her to go through the agony of childbirth to satisfy their own moral code. I do not see what is particularly moral about that, but I respect people who have a different point of view.