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An international abortion conference was held in Newcastle, Co. Down, on 12 November 1994 under the auspices of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and supported by the Simon Population Trust*. Speakers came from several countries in Europe and from Canada to share their experiences of abortion law reform and abortion services with some eighty policy makers, health, social work and legal professionals in Northern Ireland. The 1967 Abortion Act does not apply in the Province, and since 1967 more than 35,000 women, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, have been forced to come to England for abortions that are still illegal at home. These are the official figures published by the OPCS. The real figures are higher as many women from the Province stay with English friends or relatives and are entered under the statistics for England and Wales.
Before the conference took place, a series of opinion surveys were published showing the state of public and professional opinion about abortion in the Province. The notion, so often repeated in parliament by Sir Patrick Mayhew, that abortion law reform could not take place in Ulster because public opinion there would not countenance it, was shown to be false. Each year for the past three years, 1992-94, opinion polls conducted by Ulster Marketing Surveys showed that four fifths of people in Northern Ireland in the main fertile age groups 16-45 wished abortion to be legal "to maintain the physical or mental health of the mother". Three quarters did so in cases of sexual assault; three fifths in cases of likely severe handicap to the child; and an increasing minority supported lawful abortion in cases of extreme poverty or on request of the woman, even without any medical indications. Dr Colin Francome had undertaken surveys of medical opinion in Northern Ireland. He found that more than three fifths of gynaecologists would be prepared to carry out abortions on health grounds, on grounds of fetal handicap and in cases of sexual assault if abortion were legal there. He also found that 43% of GPs in Northern Ireland had had at least one request for abortion during the past three months. Two thirds of GPs said they thought the decision about abortion should be left to the woman in consultation with her doctor. The fourth survey was undertaken among women from Northern Ireland coming to the Marie Stopes clinic in London for abortion. 91% would have preferred to be able to obtain their abortions at home. More than two thirds of women knew other women who had had to come to England for abortion. Ten per cent of women knew between six and ten women in this position and 4% knew more than ten other women from the province who had had to seek abortion in London.
In 1994 the Standing Commission on Human Rights in Northern Ireland, a government appointed body, issued a public consultation document on abortion recommending that the Government "bring forward options for a clearer law". It suggested that the present confused state of the abortion law in Northern Ireland might not be able to withstand challenge before the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg.
The state of the abortion law in Northern Ireland is much as it was in the rest of the United Kingdom in the early sixties. The evidence shows that there exists a substantial majority in Northern Ireland among both the public and the professionals that favours early reform to bring Northern Ireland into the modern world alongside the rest of Western Europe.
Madeleine Simms
*Reference: "Human Rights and Reproductive Choice: Abortion Law in Northern Ireland", IPPF, 1995