Editorial: Cowardly Stormont goes from an almost total ban on abortion to making it legal on demand, then placing sweeping restrictions on protests against such terminations

​When same-sex marriage came into Northern Ireland, we were assured that churches would not be forced to bless such relationships.

While that principle remains largely intact, it has already been challenged and undermined within a few years of such marriages becoming legal so as to suggest that such a religious exemption is by no means guaranteed in the medium term (although radical activists who would merrily force Christian institutions to endorse such relationships would not dare to do the same with Islam).

When it comes to the horror of abortion, things are moving similarly quickly. Remember how only a few years ago we were told that legal reform was all about facilitating terminations in cases of fatal foetal abnormality ​and other exceptionally rare situations? Then in no time abortion on demand was on the statute books in Northern Ireland, a position that is legally far slacker than England and Wales, where there are stricter (albeit largely theoretical) rules before a pregnancy can be ended.

Not only have we moved to abortion on demand in the first third of a pregnancy, we have made it hard to so much as protest outside a clinic where such a revolting procedure is taking place. Two people have just been in court for such protests in Coleraine.

These anti protest laws demand such long distances between protest and clinic as to render almost useless the right of the demonstrator to make a point that might in fact be heard.

Intimidation of people entering clinics should of course be prohibited. But it is cowardly of Stormont to go from being a parliament where there was a big majority against any liberalisation of abortion laws at all to one that won’t even let people make public the reasonable view that terminating a pregnancy is the calculated snuffing out of an emerging human being.