(2)case of royal college of nursing of the united kingdom v DHSS?
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It helps, when you have excerpts you are working from, to give a link. All I have is the full transcript.
The question before the House of Lords was whether abortions performed by nurses were legal. The tradition was that abortions were illegal. The Parliament wrote a law exempting abortions performed by licensed medical professionals (doctors.) But a common procedure then arose in which chemicals are injected, inducing the abortion. This was simpler than the older procedures. Thus nurses and midwives commonly performed the procedure.
Read with the common meaning of the statute, only doctors could legally perform the procedure. This would make the nurses criminals. Some of the Lords, such as Edmund-Davies, felt that the statute was clear and, under the existing law, nurses would be criminals for performing abortions. If, these Lords argued, we want to change the law to protect nurses then the Parliament has to vote to change the law.
Others, such as Lord Keith of Kinkel, argued that the intent of the law was to exempt medical procedures, the doctor was still, technically, in charge of the procedure, so the nurse performed abortions were within the spirit of the law.
It’s possible that a majority could have read the law with the common meaning of the words and still felt that a doctor’s supervision was all that the law required. But probably a majority of strict constructionists would have said that unless the Doctor performs the key steps toward inducing the abortion the law didn’t protect the procedure and nurses could be prosecuted. While this would probably have been against the intent of the original Parliament, it would have been in keeping with the words they used.
You will have to use the quotes from the different Lords to illustrate the various positions.
