Ministers back Bill to lift ban on abortion in N Ireland

FOUR ministers have backed a Bill to legalise abortion in Northern Ireland, in a move which risks tensions with DUP MPS who support Theresa May.

Penny Mordaunt, the women and equalities minister, Victoria Atkins, the women’s minister and Caroline Dinenage, the health minister, voted in favour of the draft legislation.

The measure – also supported by Jo Johnson, the education minister – would decriminalise abortion in the entire UK, including Northern Ireland.

Terminating a pregnancy in Northern Ireland is illegal without an exceptional medical or mental health reason, but campaigners claim pressure is growing for the ban to be lifted.

Abortion is a devolved issue but the Stormont parliament is not currently sitting, so MPS want to use the Parliament in London to change the law.

The Bill is unlikely to succeed unless it has Government backing, which it currently does not. There is also time pressure which makes it unlikely to proceed, but MPS said the vote yesterday shows there is growing desire to unpick the laws on abortion across the UK.

In the Commons yesterday, 208 MPS backed the changes, while 123 voted against. Diana Johnson, the Labour MP who proposed the Bill, said Northern Ireland’s 157-year-old laws are “one of the harshest abortion regimes in the world”, without recourse to abortion even in cases of rape, incest or fatal fetal abnormality.

However, the Conservative MP Fiona Bruce opposed the Bill, saying it “seeks to permit a woman up to 24 weeks’ pregnant to obtain an abortion for any or no reason at all”.