European court of human rights finds that Polish abortion legislation breached a pregnant woman’s right to privacy and family life, after her foetus was diagnosed with Down’s syndrome
Making abortion illegal is contrary to the right to privacy and family life?
Great result for polish women, but this is not a real right to abortion, but a court twisting the law in an astonishingly blatant way.
The right to privacy is mostly discussed as the right to live your life without being spied upon by corporations or the government, but it actually goes further: it is the right to make “design decisions” about the most private aspects of your life without the government being able to interfere. The court decided that the law banning abortion impacted some of these most private aspects.
Non-interference is a prerequisite for privacy, but here it does not require omission but rather that a person wanted the state to perform an action through third parties. I know that balancing rights is always difficult and never leaves everyone satisfied, but such an extreme interpretation is even dangerous, it is almost an absolute shield capable of invalidating much of the law; btw, it would be fun to see the brazen court uphold controversial laws like those against prostitution or hard drugs.
But there remains the original problem, that anti-abortion law exists because they consider the fetus to be another third party, that’s a fundamental issue here and from the news I’ve seen the court seems to have ignored it.
If someone wants to establish abortion as a european right I am fine with that, but it is something that must be done through legislative processes, it is not the competence of a court on its own and even less so in a veiled and botched way.
Making abortion illegal is contrary to the right to privacy and family life?
Great result for polish women, but this is not a real right to abortion, but a court twisting the law in an astonishingly blatant way.
The right to privacy is mostly discussed as the right to live your life without being spied upon by corporations or the government, but it actually goes further: it is the right to make “design decisions” about the most private aspects of your life without the government being able to interfere. The court decided that the law banning abortion impacted some of these most private aspects.
Non-interference is a prerequisite for privacy, but here it does not require omission but rather that a person wanted the state to perform an action through third parties. I know that balancing rights is always difficult and never leaves everyone satisfied, but such an extreme interpretation is even dangerous, it is almost an absolute shield capable of invalidating much of the law; btw, it would be fun to see the brazen court uphold controversial laws like those against prostitution or hard drugs.
But there remains the original problem, that anti-abortion law exists because they consider the fetus to be another third party, that’s a fundamental issue here and from the news I’ve seen the court seems to have ignored it.
If someone wants to establish abortion as a european right I am fine with that, but it is something that must be done through legislative processes, it is not the competence of a court on its own and even less so in a veiled and botched way.