A HIGH Court hearing challenging the Secretary of State, Executive and Health Department failure to commission and fund abortion services in Northern Ireland begins today.
The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is taking the case supported by a woman who was affected by the lack of commissioning of services during the Covid -19 pandemic.
Abortion was legalised in Northern Ireland in 2019 and in March Secretary of State Brandon Lewis laid down new regulations in Westminster, compelling Stormont to commission abortion services in the region.
However, while individual health trusts offer services on an ad-hoc basis, the Department of Health has yet to centrally commission the services regionally.
In 2020, the woman, who has been granted anonymity, was told she could not have an abortion through her local trust as the service was unavailable in her area and would instead have to travel to England during the pandemic.
She said such a journey "would have put me at risk at a time when we were being urged not to travel" and "would have left me having to explain why I was travelling to England at the time of the pandemic and needed time off work at short notice".
The woman said she was "not comfortable" with having to "invent an excuse or refuse to give any reasons" and instead turned to `Women on the Web', buying early medical abortion pills.
She said the remote service "was no substitute for the reassurance that accessing a NHS service would provide", but would have had to go to her GP or local A&E "if anything went wrong".
Chief Commissioner Les Allamby said it is taking action "to ensure the law that now requires equal access to abortion services is met".
He warned failure to fund and commission abortion services "breaches the European Convention on Human Rights".
Mr Allamby accused the three branches of government of playing a "`pass the parcel' where the music never stops", saying after more than a year there was "little sign of movement until we decided to go to court".
Meanwhile, former Attorney General John Larkin QC last week issued legal papers on behalf of a pro-life group in a bid to overturn Westminster's compelling of abortion services.
