1st Italia's Crucifixes, Now Ireland's Abortion Laws

The attacks on national sovereignty & Christianity using the European Court of Human Rights to silence the Church especially when it comes to defending life continues. The sick & sad irony is that by saying abortion is a human right they are allowing it to trump a true & the most basic of human rights, the right to life for the unborn child.

This is just another sign of how post & non-Christian the EU is. Remember a few years ago when the proposed constitution totally admitted any mention of Europe's Christian heritage while playing up its pagan roots. What is going on there, & what many of the treaties that the US is being pushed to sign & ratify, are actually attempts to undermine national authority as well as undermine representative government. The EU functions as a bureaucracy that hands down rulings by a nonelected body that the nations are forced to obey even if the people don't want to. But, as shown by the recent reactions in Italia to the ECHR Crucifix ban, people are not going to lay down & take it quietly.

Here in the USA we are seeing the same thing with how Obama & the Democratic Congress are ignoring the will of the people to set up a socialist state. The people are starting to rise up & are fighting to take our country back. As I have said before, at its roots this is a spiritual battle. & we must keep using all the spiritual weapons God has provided us to use. We also must speak up & act. Those spiritual weapons don't give us the excuse to be passive, instead God requires us to act when & where we can in order for them to be fully effective.

European Court of Human Rights Puts Pro-life Ireland in Hot Seat
By Piero A. Tozzi, J.D.

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) Irish abortion laws and sovereignty stand in the dock next week when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) hears a challenge to Ireland's constitutional protection of life "from conception."

Three petitioners in the case A, B & C v. Ireland allege that they were forced to travel overseas to obtain abortions, undergoing unnecessary expenses and hardship due to the nation's pro-life laws. They claim violations of various rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Third-party interveners Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, the European Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defense Fund (on behalf of Family Research Council), contend that it is "Ireland's sovereign right to determine when life begins" and what rights attach to pre-natal life. They also claim that domestic remedies have not been exhausted, and that therefore the ECHR lacks jurisdiction to hear the case.

Ireland's constitution "acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right." The country's recent approval of the Lisbon Treaty after receiving guarantees that its pro-life constitution would remain unaffected has raised the stakes of the Court's decision.

Skeptics of the ECHR's ability to be impartial where "abortion rights" are implicated point to the court's 2007 ruling Tysiąc v. Poland, which held that Poland had violated the European Convention by denying a woman a "therapeutic" abortion that allegedly would have saved her eyesight. The woman there had obtained a certificate from a general practitioner as a prerequisite to obtaining an abortion allowable under Polish law, which remains among Europe's most protective of the unborn. Five medical experts overruled the general practitioner, determining that the ongoing deterioration in eyesight was unrelated to her pregnancy – a finding seconded post-delivery by a review panel of three additional experts. Despite this, as the dissent pointed out, the ECHR credited the one generalist's opinion over that of eight experts to reach the desired result.

Jakob Cornides, a European legal commentator who has criticized the Tysiąc decision, distinguished that case from the present one, noting that, "rightly or wrongly, Tysiąc was premised upon the notion that Ms. Tysiąc's contemplated abortion would have been legal under Polish law, and if lawful, it should have been available. In Ireland, however, the constitution protects unborn life and legislation indisputably prohibits abortion."

Cornides further points out that "the Court so far has avoided taking a position on whether abortion should be legal or not, leaving this question to national legislators. It would indeed be inconceivable that countries like Ireland or Poland, to name just two, would have signed up to the Convention if they foresaw an explicit or implicit 'right to abortion.'"

Irish voters overwhelmingly approved Ireland's pro-life constitutional provision in a 1983 referendum. Pro-lifers further note that Ireland has the world's lowest rate of maternal mortality in childbirth, as confirmed in a recent report by the World Economic Forum.