Why would any country put abortion in the Constitution?
April 20, 2017
by Mairead Enright. (@maireadenright)
In Ireland, the abortion debate is often conducted by reference to Britain. Conservatives associate the Abortion Act 1967 with the bogeyman of ‘abortion on demand’. In the struggle to ‘be different from Britain’, we perhaps miss some of our commonalities with other countries which have taken a similar route to regulating abortion. Ireland is unusual in ‘writing abortion into the Constitution’, but it is not alone. It is very difficult to generalise across jurisdictions, especially because Constitutions perform different functions in different jurisdictions, and are subject to different procedures for amendment. However, a quick survey suggests that Ireland has only about 20 fellow travellers; a few in Europe (such as Hungary and the Czech Republic), more in South America, where the trend began (Chile, Honduras, Ecuador, El Salvador) and the rest in Africa (Swaziland, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe etc).
Continued at source: Human Rights in IReland: http://humanrights.ie/constitution-of-ireland/why-would-a-country-put-abortion-in-the-constitution/