The European Human Rights Court to Review Irish Abortion Ban

It looks like the Irish ban on abortion will have to defend itself before 17 justices at the European HCR:

Ireland's almost complete ban on abortion was challenged before 17 European judges yesterday as a violation of fundamental human rights.

Three women, named only as A, B and C, brought a landmark case before the European Human Rights court in Strasbourg, the outcome of which could force Ireland to weaken its strict laws against abortion for the first time in 17 years.

The three plaintiffs - two Irish women and a Lithuanian - say that their own rights to health and life were threatened by pregnancies which they could not terminate legally in Ireland the only EU state other than Malta, with a near outright ban on the procedure. Like an estimated 7,000 Irish women a year, the three women travelled to the UK to obtain legal abortions in Britain.

The case is, in theory, not a frontal assault on a ban which has been enshrined in Irish law for more than a hundred years and reinforced in the Irish constitution since 1983. It is an attempt to clarify and widen the exception, approved in 1992, which permits a pregnancy to be terminated when a woman's life is threatened. Nonetheless, the Irish government fears, and pro-abortion campaigners hope, that a court ruling in the women's favour could lead to a de facto unravelling of Irish abortion law.

The Irish law is particularly egregious, since, "If an abortion was later judged to be unnecessary, an Irish doctor could be struck off [have his license pulled] or imprisoned for life. As a result, she said, no statistics existed to say whether any 'legal' abortions had ever taken place in Ireland."

One hopes that the Europeans look at the United States, and realize that pandering the Neanderthals only makes them ask for more.