In the course of an impassioned post on abortion recently Digby warned women who think they can just travel to another state should abortion be banned where they live, that it’s naive to think fundie misogynists in government would not outlaw travelling to obtain an abortion elsewhere too.
Want proof? Well here it is, happening in Ireland:
Irish court battle over teenager’s abortion right
· ‘Tragic case’ reignites call for constitutional change
· Doctors say brain impaired baby would live only daysOwen Bowcott in Dublin
Wednesday May 2, 2007
The GuardianA pregnant 17-year-old in state care in Ireland began a court battle yesterday to be allowed to travel to England for an abortion, as the country’s failure to resolve the ambiguities in its abortion laws threatened to erupt into a constitutional crisis.
The teenager, who is four months into the pregnancy, is seeking an abortion because the baby has got a rare brain condition and will not live more than three days after birth, she has been told.
Identified only as Miss D, the teenager has been in the care of Ireland’s health service executive (HSE), since February.
The government agency has overruled her wish for an abortion in Britain. The young woman’s father is absent and her mother’s behaviour had led to earlier court proceedings.
Abortion in this predominantly Catholic country, where the influence of the church has gradually weakened, remains illegal, with the ban on it written into the constitution. Abortions can only be performed if there is a substantial risk to the mother’s life, which includes the threat of suicide. The law does not permit abortion on grounds of foetal abnormality.
Most women seeking an abortion go to England for the operation. Successive complex cases have led to hearings at the European court of human rights and several divisive national referenda.
Since 2002, three teenagers in care have been allowed to go abroad for terminations.
But the republic’s abortion laws have never been fully clarified. As long ago as 1992, a supreme court judge warned that the failure to introduce proper legislation was “inexcusable”.
Last year a 45-year-old woman lost a case in Europe in which she said she had been denied her human rights because she could not have an abortion on grounds of foetal abnormality. The court dismissed her application saying the issue had not yet been dealt with by the Irish courts.
This latest case, emerging in the opening days of a general election campaign, has prompted fresh calls for constitutional reform.
[…]
The application on behalf of the young woman has been brought by her boyfriend, who is supporting her. The teenager, from the Leinster region, had not considered having an abortion until told about the foetus’s medical condition.
Doctors say the baby suffers from anencephaly, a condition where the front part of the brain is missing. The condition is detected through blood screening. Such children are normally blind, deaf, and unconscious. The high court in Dublin has been told that life expectancy would be somewhere between several hours and, at the maximum, three days.
Miss D’s lawyers are seeking the removal of the restrictions on her right to leave Ireland and the rescinding of a request sent to the Gardai to prevent her travelling abroad.
The legal challenge will be heard at Dublin’s Four Courts tomorrow. Lawyers for the teenager said it was a matter of “great importance” that the case be heard as speedily as possible.
The court heard that the young woman was not suicidal but had not wanted to have an abortion before hearing about her baby’s condition.
[..]
They want to force a teenager to carry to term and give birth to a baby that’s deformed and bound to die. This on the same day that priests and employees of the very Catholic church which is behind this cruel law are found to have been wallowing in even more filth and child abuse than had been previously thought.
That’s the culture of life?
The Catholic church has no moral right to tell any woman anywhere what she can and can’t do with her body, so far as to be able to place restrictions even on her right to movement, over-populated as it is with the emotionally disturbed and criminal perverts.
I cannot think of any other situation in which an organisation proven to have harboured sexual criminals and to have colluded in evading the law to protect its rapists and child molestors from justice is given the legal right to impose its twisted morality on women’s private medical decisions .
