On November 30, 2015, the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland (Court) ruled that aspects of Northern Ireland’s abortion laws are incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (Convention). According to a news report, Northern Ireland permits abortions only “in cases where a woman’s life is threatened or where there is a permanent or serious risk to her well-being.” The Court found that the current laws regarding abortion violate Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the Convention, as they provide no provisions dealing with sexual abuse or incest resulting in pregnancy. The Court stated
“that the current law places a disproportionate burden on the victim of sexual crime.  She has to face all the dangers and problems, emotional or otherwise, of carrying a foetus for which she bears no moral responsibility but is merely a receptacle to carry the child of a rapist and/or a person who has committed incest, or both . . . . By imposing a blanket ban on abortion, reinforced with criminal sanctions, it effectively prevents any consideration of the interests of any woman whose personal autonomy in those circumstances has been so vilely and heinously invaded.  A law so framed, can never be said to be proportionate.” The Court further found that the laws on abortion violated Article 8 of the Convention due to their ban on abortions in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, noting that in those cases “there is no life to protect.  When the foetus leaves the womb, it cannot survive independently.  It is doomed.  There is nothing to weigh in the balance.  There is no human life to protect.”