A WOMAN who was given an abortion in error is trying to persuade the European Court of Human Rights to accept that a foetus has a “right to life”.

In the first case of its kind, the 36-year-old Frenchwoman is campaigning to have the termination of her unborn child classified as homicide.

Although the case happened in France, family-planning groups say that if the court backs her abortions and various forms of contraception, including the coil and the morning-after pill, could become illegal across Europe.

Thi-Nho Vo, a French citizen of Vietnamese origin, was six months pregnant when she lost her baby after a mix-up in 1991 in the Hotel-Dieu hospital in Lyons. She had gone to hospital for a regular pre-natal check-up, but on the same day in the same hospital another woman, Thanh Van Vo, was due to have a coil removed.

The pregnant Mrs Vo could not speak French and was unable to communicate with the gynaecologist, François Golfier, who mistook the two patients with the same surname. He tried to remove the coil from the pregnant woman and pierced the amniotic sac, forcing an emergency abortion.

Mrs Vo immediately pushed for him to be prosecuted for homicide but after a four-year case Dr Golfier was acquitted. A year later he lost an appeal and was given a six-month suspended prison sentence and fined Fr10,000. He then appealed to France’s highest court, which backed him because it refused to consider the foetus was a human being entitled to the full protection of criminal law.

Mrs Vo denounced the French authorities’ “refusal to classify as involuntary homicide the attack on the life of the unborn child she was carrying”, and took the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Her lawyer will argue in court that Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to life, applies to a foetus.

Mrs Vo’s lawyer, Bruno Le Griel, said yesterday: “I will be asking the court to recognise reality — that is to say, human life begins at the moment of conception. Who would dare tell my client to her face that what she lost as a result of a mistake in the hospital was nothing more than a cluster of cells and was not her child?”

The UK’s Family Planning Association (FPA) has made a formal submission to the court urging that it must not consider a foetus as a person with rights. The FPA believes that insisting that foetuses are entitled to the right to life from the moment of conception will mean that abortion across Europe will become illegal. Forms of contraception such as the coil and the emergency pill, which take effect after an egg is fertilised, could also become illegal.

Anne Weyman, chief executive of the FPA, said that what happened to Mrs Vo was tragic, but warned the court not to rule in her favour: “The implications would be that all methods of contraception apart from barrier and natural family planning could be affected.”

Last week, the abortion laws faced another legal challenge when Joanna Jepson, a Church of England curate, won the right to a judicial review of a case where a foetus with a cleft palate was aborted at an advanced stage of pregnancy.

The European Court of Human Rights will decide in the next few days whether Mrs Vo’s case is legally admissible.

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