
DUBLIN — 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 Thursday.
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.
The Human Rights Committee 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 European Union.
In Dublin, Mellet said she hoped the government would find ‘‘the courage to make necessary changes in law.’’
Ireland’s health minister, Simon Harris, said the government was open to reforming the law on the matter. But he said the process could take years.
Rights watchdogs said Ireland needs to move faster, noting that it had taken the country more than two decades to legalize abortions deemed necessary to save a pregnant woman’s life. That move happened after 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.
Associated Press