Pro-life charities have welcomed the Court of Appeal’s decision to overturn a judge’s decision to force a young woman with the mental age of a child to have an abortion.
On Monday three appeal judges ruled that the abortion, to be carried out on a woman in her 20s who has the mental capacity of a six to nine-year-old child, must not be allowed to take place, despite a judge at the Court of Protection ruling previously that the abortion was in her best interests.
The appeal judges said they would explain their decision at a later date.
Clare McCarthy, a spokesperson for Right to Life UK, said the decision was welcome and would save the woman “much undue distress”. It said, however, that the ruling should never have happened.
“We are calling on the Department of Health to urgently reveal how many women have been forced to have an abortion in the UK over the last 10 years and make it clear how they will ensure it will not happen again,” she said.
Mrs Justice Lieven at the Court of Protection had given the go-ahead for an NHS trust to carry out the abortion even though the woman wanted to keep the baby. The woman lives with her mother, a Catholic, who had also indicated she was willing to look after the baby.
More than 68,000 people signed a petition by Right to Life UK on the website CitizenGo, urging the health secretary to intervene.
Speaking on behalf of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, Bishop John Sherrington, auxiliary bishop of Westminster Archdiocese said:
“I welcome the decision of the three Court of Appeal judges to overturn the initial ruling by Mrs Justice Lieven.
“It is both astonishing and shocking that the NHS should seek to end a healthy pregnancy against the wishes of the pregnant woman, her mother, and her social worker.
“Forcing a woman to have an abortion against her will, and that of her close family, would have infringed her human rights, and the right of her unborn child to life in a family that has committed to caring for this child. In a free society like ours there is a delicate balance between the rights of the individual and the powers of the state and the initial ruling upset that balance. I am therefore pleased that the recent ruling has taken the woman’s best interests into account and has upheld her rights in this case.
“This case raises fundamental questions of human rights, and there is now an urgent need for the Government to clarify what the limits are on the powers of the NHS to force abortions on women who do not want them.”
The Bishop of Nottingham, Patrick McKinney, on Monday wrote to Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, on behalf of Catholics in his diocese urging him to urgently intervene in the case.
"To force an abortion on a woman who wants to keep her child is a grave violation of the personal lives of its citizens on behalf of the state," Bishop McKinney wrote in response to the original Court of Protection ruling.
"From a faith perspective it also represents a violation of this woman's and her family's deeply held Catholic belief regarding the sanctity of life and the morality of abortion", the letter continued.
The national Catholic bioethics centre for the UK and Ireland, the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, said in a statement that that the Court of Appeal had reversed a "gravely unjust situation".
"What seems to have been insufficiently appreciated in Lieven J’s initial judgement is the genuine joy that the woman would feel on being able to carry her pregnancy to term and to meet and bond with her baby following its birth. Any legitimate account of her best interests must not fail to acknowledge this, as well as how traumatic a coerced late-term abortion might be," the statement said.
The Centre said that in this case abortion was not offered for medical reasons, but was "imposed as an attempt to fix a problem that is essentially social" – the possibility that the woman’s mother may not always be able to care for the baby.
"The Court of Protection’s ruling would have set a dangerous precedent, for it suggests that something so intimate and morally significant as a mother-child relationship can be trampled on by the state when there is an expectation of suffering caused by the lack of social support," the statement continued.
Life Charity likewise said in a statement issued on 25 June that they were "thoroughly relieved" that the ruling had been overturned.
Life’s Head of Advocacy Liz Parsons said: “This couldn’t be better news for all concerned. There is no way such a judgement should ever have been made and had it gone ahead would have been a most grave violation of human rights. Three judges have now concluded that doctors must not carry out this abortion in a result that finally shows true compassion for all concerned."
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