Westminster was determined to advance grisly new abortion laws for Northern Ireland

The politicians that Westminster wanted to appease tend to back liberalisation of termination and marriage laws, while the MLAs it wanted to put pressure on tend to oppose them.

The laws the government unveiled on abortion yesterday are grisly. There will be abortion on demand in the first trimester of a pregnancy, which technically is not the case in Great Britain (where there have to be medical reasons for termination, a requirement that is in effect ignored).

There is abortion up to 24 weeks “in cases where the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the regnant woman or girl, greater than the risk of terminating the pregnancy”. But that looks like a smokescreen for abortion on demand up to 24 weeks, as in GB (where a health condition applies to all pregnancies up to 24 weeks, but as mentioned above is just a formality).

Finally, there is abortion until birth for “a mental or physical disability which is likely to significantly limit either the length or quality of the child’s life”.

That sounds likely to include genetic disorders such as Down’s Sydrome, which is completely unacceptable.

In Great Britain it is hard to get doctors to perform abortions after 15 or 16 weeks, due to the revolting nature of the procedure on a foetus that by then is obviously an emerging human life. It is hard even to think of abortions twice as late.

The results of the Northern Ireland consultation, of clear opposition to reform among respondents, have been ignored.

Instead, the government has done what it wanted to do: advanced the deplorable notion that an abortion is no business of the law and little to do with medicine either. Instead, goes this appalling and tragic narrative, it just involves a collection of cells and is wholly a matter of female autonomy.