Choice Ireland

CARL O'BRIEN, Social Affairs Correspondent
Wed, Jul 15, 2009

THE EUROPEAN Court of Human Rights has agreed to hear a challenge by three women in Ireland to the Government's ban on abortion in a full hearing before its grand chamber of 17 judges.

The women claim the restrictive nature of Irish law on abortion jeopardises their health and their wellbeing and violates their human rights. The identities of the three will remain confidential.

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Hundreds of embryonic stem cell lines, whose use in the United States had effectively been curtailed by the Bush administration, can be used to study disorders and develop cures if researchers can show the cells were derived using ethical procedures, according to new rules issued by the federal government yesterday.

By Anna Wilkowska-Landowska, RH Reality Check, Eastern Europe

Last month, after five years of advocacy, Monaco approved a new law, which legalizes medically necessary abortions. Monaco was one of the last three states in Europe where abortion was illegal. The other two countries are Ireland and Malta.

The Guardian
The bitter dispute over abortion in the US has received a violent jolt after a doctor in Kansas, one of the few in the country to perform so-called late-term abortions, was shot dead at a church near his clinic.

George Tiller, 67, who had been targeted in other attacks over the years, was killed just after 10am yesterday in the lobby of the Reformation Lutheran church in Wichita, where he was acting as an usher during a morning service.

His wife, Jeanne, was singing in the choir at the time.

For the third time in ten years, another United Nations human rights monitoring body has recommended that the abortion law in Northern Ireland should be amended and better protection afforded to women’s human rights. The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the monitoring body of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights met in Geneva on the 12 and 13 of May 2009, to examine the UK and Northern Ireland government.

Students support OTC emergency contraception
Written by Nick O'Donoghue Monday, 25 May 2009
A new study has revealed the majority of medical and non-medical students in an Irish university believe emergency contraception should be available without prescription from pharmacies.
The majority of support came from non-medical students (77 per cent), however, more than half (57 per cent ) of the medical students involved in the study were also in favour of selling the morning-after pill over the counter (OTC).

Amnesty International today urged the Nicaraguan authorities to act upon the UN Committee against Torture call for Nicaragua to review its complete ban on abortion with a view to including exceptions to the total prohibition.

05.20.09 —Today, Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered the Nepal government to enact a comprehensive abortion law to guarantee that women have access to safe and affordable abortion services. Since 2002, Nepalese law has permitted abortion under most circumstances, but multiple barriers—including the government’s failure to implement its own policy, prohibitive costs, and inadequate availability of abortion providers—have prevented women from accessing safe abortion services.

MADRID (AP) — Spain plans to make the contraceptive morning-after pill available over the counter in pharmacies without prescription within three months, Health Minister Trinidad Jimenez said Monday.

Jimenez said the pill will be sold to people of all ages to "avoid unwanted pregnancies."

Jimenez said the morning-after pill did not constitute a means of aborting pregnancies but should not be regarded as a routine method of contraception.

"It's an emergency method for dealing with unplanned and unexpected sexual relations without protection," she said.

BOOK OF THE DAY: ANTHEA McTEIRNAN reviews Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora: the “abortion trail” and the making of a London-Irish Underground, 1980-2000 by Anne Rossiter IASC publications pp 237, €8

IT IS to this island’s shame that it continues to abandon half its population to a reliance on the kindness of strangers.

This year, almost 5,000 women from the Republic and 1,500 women from Northern Ireland will be forced to travel to England to have an abortion. They will do so in trepidation, in fear, often in debt and in secrecy.