Dutch Parliament rushes to broaden abortion law

What D66 –supported by the centre-right VVD, the Social Democratic PvdA and environmental party GroenLinks– will argue on Thursday is no secret: abolishing the consultation period is only futility, a small step. In their view, it will not make abortion practice any sloppier or more careless.

That observation is not entirely out of the blue, as the Netherlands has had an extremely liberal abortion practice for many years, even with the minimum five-day reconsideration time-out, Dutch newspaper Reformatorisch Dagblad writes. The compulsory reconsideration time-out has not been able to prevent this. According to the Christian newspaper, the real switch was made as early as 1981, when parliament approved the present abortion law.

Concessions

In 1981, secular parties were also in the majority. But when the abortion law was being drafted, Christian parties could still force concessions. One of these was the inclusion of some care requirements that could be enforced under criminal law. The reconsideration time was the most important, along with the obligation to provide information.

Such provisions can now be removed from the criminal law, D66, PvdA, GroenLinks, and VVD say. According to them, after 1981, all kinds of treatment guidelines were added to the Dutch Civil Code, specifying what doctors must do when providing care. This would sufficiently guarantee the supervision of an abortion treatment.

Vulnerable women

It is clear that, in drafting their initiative bill, the parties did not have in mind the group of vulnerable women who must choose under pressure from their environment. But that group does exist. Research from 2014 shows that one in six unplanned pregnant women are still in doubt about their choice at their first visit to the general practitioner. Research has also shown that 7 per cent of the women who had initially chosen abortion later decided to carry the pregnancy to full term.

The most significant risk of this proposal has not yet been mentioned. Suppose the opinion gains ground that standardisation by medical disciplinary law for abortion is sufficient and that criminal law is no longer necessary. In that case, this will pave the way for the intervention to be increasingly viewed as a standard medical act.

Pulling a tooth

President Diederik van Dijk of the Dutch Patients Association NPV (a pro-life movement that forms ideas about medical developments from the perspective of Christian ethics, ed.) also points out this danger. "Abortion is not the same as pulling a tooth", he says in the Dutch newspaper Nederlands Dagblad. "Abortion is about new, growing life – a child that can develop further, as long as it is given the time to do so."

Van Dijk acknowledges that there is also a situation in which a woman has an unwanted pregnancy. According to him, the abortion law considers protecting unborn human life and offering help to pregnant women unintentionally, for example, through abortion.

In the law, the value of the unborn life is weighed against the woman's right to dispose of her own body, the NPV-chairman says. However, by "abandoning the fixed term for deliberation, this balance in the law is disturbed."