Douglas, Isle of Man, Jan 17, 2017 / 20:04 pm
A member of the Isle of Man's legislature and a pro-choice campaign group are aiming to reform the island's abortion laws, but are receiving push-back from a local right-to-life group.
"Our current law has at least done a good job of maintaining general right-to-life protections for unborn children, and safeguarding Manx women from the worst effects of the system of abortion-on-demand in the UK," Hannah Grove, spokesperson of Humanity and Equality in Abortion Reform, said Jan. 15.
"The Island has an abortion rate that is at least a third of England and Wales, and that is because of the wise strictures in our native 1995 legislation. We are way ahead of the UK, and adopting anything like their outdated and failed 1967 Act would be a regressive and hopeless folly."
Though abortion is not illegal on the Isle of Man, a crown dependency located between England and Northern Ireland, its current law – the Termination of Pregnancy Act 1995 – allows for abortions only if the pregnancy was a result of rape or on grounds of harm to the mother or fetal disability.