Forced abortion woman asks court to grant rights to foetus
Thi-Nho Vo went to the European Court of Human Rights after France's highest court overturned the doctor's conviction on a charge of involuntary homicide. The French court ruled that the foetus was not yet a human being entitled to the protection of criminal law. Abortion rights groups have filed arguments supporting the French position, warning that accepting a right to life for a foetus could make abortions illegal in all 45 countries that recognise the court's jurisdiction.
"Obviously we are concerned about its implications for abortion in this country and Europe as a whole," said Anne Weyman, chief executive of the Family Planning Association in Britain, which was granted permission to file submissions opposing the
application. The court, based in Strasbourg, heard arguments yesterday on both the admissibility and merits of the case, said spokesman Roderick Liddell.
If the court agrees to accept the case a decision should be made in a couple weeks a judgment will follow in two to three months, he said.
According to court documents, Vo, 36, who lives in Bourg-en-Bresse, France, went to a hospital in Lyons in November 1991, for an examination when she was six months pregnant. On the same day, another woman of Vietnamese origin with the same last name, Thanh Van Vo, was due to have a contraceptive device known as a coil removed from her uterus.
Vo did not speak French and her gynaecologist mistook her for the other. He pierced her amniotic sac, making a therapeutic abortion necessary.
Vo lodged a criminal complaint and the doctor was eventually charged with unintentional homicide. He was acquitted in 1996, but the Lyons Court of Appeal reversed the verdict a year later and sentenced him to six months in prison.
In 1999, the Court of Cassation, France's highest court, overturned the appeal court's judgment.
Vo's complaint to the European court charges that France has an obligation to make such acts a criminal offence based on Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to life. Her lawyer, Bruno Le Griel, said he wanted the court to establish that "the human life, a human being, begins at the moment of conception."
But the Family Planning Association told the court such a decision would invalidate British law, under which rights are not granted until a living baby is born.
"I think what happened to her was a very tragic case, but you cannot make law on the basis of a tragic case,"
Weyman said.
