The abortion debate rages on, but do we need to clarify the law here?

On Tuesday evening last week, Gordon Brown summoned a Labour MP to issue a warning that any move to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland would put the Stormont administration at risk.

The MP had been among the leaders of an all-party group which had signalled its intention to table an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill the following morning giving women in the North the same access as women in England, Scotland and Wales to abortion on the NHS. The amendment would have been debated last Monday.

The MPs’ resolve to press the issue had been stiffened by briefings on the plight of women forced to travel to Britain and to pay for a procedure freely available in their own localities to other women in exactly the same circumstances.

It is this factor which underpins both the class bias in the North in relation to access to abortion and the disproportionate number of northern women who have later abortions. The less well-off a woman is, the greater the difficulty she is likely to experience organising an abortion and the longer the process is likely to take.

One result is the high probability that working-class women from Northern Ireland are more likely than any other category of women in the UK to have abortions after 16 weeks.

Brown’s pitch was that an amendment sponsored by leading Labour backbenchers would be seen as somehow emanating from the Government and, especially if it succeeded, that a Northern Ireland party looking for an excuse might use it to walk away from the power-sharing administration. His warning carried a message that the position of the Executive and the Assembly was more precarious than it might have seemed to MPs.

He also counselled that if the amendment were pressed, one or more of the northern parties would never believe a Government assurance again — the implication being that an assurance along these lines had been given in clear terms.

The plan to table the amendment was abandoned on Wednesday morning.

In the event, a glut of other amendments forced postponement of debate on the Bill until October. In the meantime, the present incoherent, obscurantist, anomalous and cowardly position will persist.

Cowardly because, currently, nobody can say with confidence what the operative law on abortion here is and none of the main parties is willing to seek or to work towards clarification.

Abortions take place in Northern Ireland every year — for reasons of severe foetal abnormality, for example — which, if put to the test of the law, would be declared illegal. Meanwhile, abortions which would be legal — on ground of serious threat to the health of the woman, for instance — are not performed.

Confusion about the legal rights and duties of medical professionals has combined with fear of religious fundamentalism to produce a situation in which even abortions which have been declared legal by the courts after examination of all the circumstances are not performed in the North, the woman or girl concerned being forced to travel to Britain — as in the 1993 case of K, a 14-year-old — to vindicate rights which the law has laid down she is fully entitled to here.

A political system which allows such blatant contradiction in a matter touching on the most sensitive rights of vulnerable people has no self-respect and deserves no respect.

We might reasonably speculate that if it were men who got pregnant, the matter would be sorted out in no time at all, without need to worry Westminster.

The furtive evasions were on public display in New York last week when an official of the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister was left hanging in the wind as she tried to explain the North’s current abortion regime at hearings of the committee overseeing the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.

It had been expected that a junior minister from OFMDFM would attend and field the questions.

But neither the DUP man nor the SF man could find time. Remarkable when we consider these folk normally go rigid with excitement at the mere thought of an(other) exes-paid trip to the States. They let a female civil servant take the heat.

"During the passage of law for devolution it was guaranteed that there would be no change without agreement of all parties," she is reported explaining.

On this formulation, it’s not women’s rights nor the views of the people which prevail, but the wishes of any one of four communal parties.

The last-ditch argument of those determined to avoid confronting the issue is that they don’t want Westminster ‘imposing’ a law here. But imposition doesn’t come into it. If the Act was extended, it would, just as soon as they’d gotten their game together and secured devolution of policing and justice, become the property of the Assembly, to be amended, augmented or rescinded as MLAs saw fit.

That is, they’d have to deal with it. It is fear of this prospect which drives some of them to scrabble in the shadows for private assurances and the rest to scurry for the safety of semantic bolt-holes.

It may be that women won’t see progress until a campaigning group begins to provide abortions here and invites prosecution.