One of the last laws in Europe banning abortion, Ireland’s eighth amendment, was decisively rejected by voters on May 25. The plebiscite’s result allows the amendment to be struck from the country’s constitution. Once that happens later this year, Irish women will no longer have to smuggle in abortifacients or cross the Irish Sea to terminate their pregnancies. Eminent news media in Europe and North America interpreted the vote as a glorious victory in the cause of freedom and rights.

The ban remains in the small U.K. province of Northern Ireland, but abortion-rights activists, with the enthusiastic backing of those same news media, have now turned their attention there. On June 7 the British Supreme Court blocked an attempt to strike down Northern Ireland’s abortion law, but only because four of seven justices concluded that the organization filing the suit—the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission—didn’t have legal standing. The court’s presiding justice, writing for the majority, agreed that Northern Ireland’s law is “incompatible” with the European Convention on Human Rights. One may wonder how a medical procedure so dependent on modern technology can be a human right, but such is the unassailable logic of modern liberalism.