Arlene Foster: Abortions do not just affect women

The new First Minister has said that the issue of abortion for children who are destined to die outside the womb is more than just a 'women's rights issue'.
Protestors campaigning for an extension of the 1967 abortion law in Great Britain to Northern Ireland demonstrated in Belfast city centreProtestors campaigning for an extension of the 1967 abortion law in Great Britain to Northern Ireland demonstrated in Belfast city centre
Protestors campaigning for an extension of the 1967 abortion law in Great Britain to Northern Ireland demonstrated in Belfast city centre

She said that the woman who find out that their foetus is fatally deformed will likely have a husband or boyfriend with whom they had been looking forward to raising the child.

Her comments – made during an interview with News Letter reporter Laura McMullan – are published today ahead of a debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly about abortion.

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The issue of abortions for mothers who are carrying children that will die after birth was thrown into the public eye in 2013, when Sarah Ewart told the BBC’s Nolan Show about her ordeal.

Arlene FosterArlene Foster
Arlene Foster

She told the BBC that as a result of the Province’s strict abortion laws, her “only choice basically was to carry the baby either until it passed away inside me or I could deliver and it would pass away.”

She ended up going to England for an abortion.

The issue of abortion came up in a wide-ranging interview Arlene Foster recently gave to the News Letter.

In comments published for the first time today, she said she had met Sarah Ewart before, and plans to do so again.

Arlene FosterArlene Foster
Arlene Foster
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“This is an incredibly sensitive issue and we will not be allowing any extension of the 1967 Act in Northern Ireland, but we want to look at where we are at in terms of the amendments that have been put forward,” she said.

She added: “I do think it’s a hugely significant change to the law and I think that just bringing it in as a last-minute amendment is not the way to deal with this issue.”

She went on to say that “there is no such a condition as fatal foetal abnormality – it is a whole range of conditions which fall within that”.

When it was put to her that the matter is an extremely sensitive one for women, she replied: “Well you say ‘women’, but is it just for women?

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“These are planned pregnancies, these are people looking forward, with their husband, with their partner, to a new baby coming and then to get this absolutely devastating news about the foetus... and so it is not just about the woman, so I think it’s wrong, and some people do put it into that context, that it’s a women’s rights issue, but it’s not just about the woman.”