Ireland's abortion ban subjects women to discriminatory, cruel and degrading treatment and should be ended immediately for cases involving fatal fetal abnormalities, UN human rights experts said today.
The 29-page report from the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Committee accepted a complaint filed by Amanda Mellet, a Dublin woman who was denied a 2011 abortion in Ireland after doctors informed her that her fetus had a heart defect and could not survive outside the womb.
Ireland permits abortions only in cases where the woman's own life is endangered by continued pregnancy. Its ban on abortion in all other circumstances requires women to carry a physiologically doomed fetus until birth or its death in the womb.
The only other option is to travel abroad for abortions, usually to England, where thousands of Irish citizens have abortions annually.
The UN Human Rights Committee, constituting experts from 17 nations led by Fabian Salvioli of Argentina, found that Ireland's abortion law violates the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and called for widespread reform.
The panel wields no power to compel change from Ireland, a predominantly Roman Catholic nation that maintains the strictest laws on abortion in the 28-nation EU.
Ireland's government and Catholic Church leaders declined to comment on the report, which seeks a formal Irish government response within six months.
In Dublin, Mellet said she hoped the government would find "the courage to make necessary changes in law."
"I hope the day will soon come when women in Ireland will be able to access the health services they need in our own country, where we can be with our loved ones, with our own medical team, and where we have our own familiar bed to go home and cry in," she said in a statement. "Subjecting women to so much additional pain and trauma simply must not continue."
Rights watchdogs said the UN findings should renew pressure on Ireland three years after the country legalised abortions deemed necessary to save a pregnant woman's life.
That move followed the 2012 death in an Irish hospital of an Indian woman, Savita Halappanavar, who suffered lethal blood poisoning after doctors refused to terminate her dying fetus.
Mark Kelly, director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, said the UN criticism "joins a chorus of expert voices reminding Ireland that its abortion regime is wildly out of kilter with abortion law and practice in the family of civilized nations."
"The Irish government must take its head out of the sand and see that it has to tackle this issue," said Colm O'Gorman, Amnesty International's director in Ireland.
Opinion polls since 2013 have recorded majority support in Ireland for extending abortions to cases involving fatal defects and pregnancies caused by rape or incest, but anti-abortion activists argue that further exceptions to the ban would lead eventually to the legalization of abortion.
