The Green Paper on abortion has advanced public understanding of the subject and has brought closer the day when the electorate will have the opportunity to resolve the issue by way of constitutional amendment.
The Green Paper is particularly helpful in taking a broad view. It presents a picture of the international and social realities of abortion which make it clear that at the heart of the matter is a debate about values, justice and human rights rather than about medicine.
Abortion is a sad and depressing subject. The decision to have an abortion can be a lonely and fearful one, made under a range of pressures.
A young woman's boyfriend may have no desire to face up to the realities of being a father over the couple of decades it takes to rear his child. Her own family may be unsupportive. Her prospects of rearing the child, alone, without adequate financial support, and with limited career prospects will make her feel she is living a nightmare.
Abortion is available only 60 miles away. In most European countries there are few, if any, restrictions on what is now characterised in European law as a service. The international culture apparently has no problem with abortion. These are the realities which underlie the decision of that woman, and nearly six thousand other Irish women, to have an abortion.
The Green Paper on abortion addresses this international perspective. The picture that emerges is one in which the humanity of the unborn child has been air-brushed out. The child before birth is treated by the law as a thing whose life is dispensable, rather than a member of the human community.
We have the puzzling spectacle of maternity hospitals in many countries in Europe where doctors one morning are striving to give the best of medical attention to a viable, unborn child of 30 weeks' gestation and later that day are striving to ensure that a child of exactly the same gestational age and viability shall not live. This confusion calls out for an explanation in terms of justice and human rights.
The task for people of reflective disposition is to try to get outside the shackles of contemporary conformist values and to take a larger view. There have been times - too many of them - when particular groups have been treated as less than fully human and excluded from the protection of the law. The grounds for this denial have included race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, economic power and physical or mental disability.
Vulnerable people are particularly exposed to exclusion and discrimination. There is a disturbing tendency in human societies to pick on those who are least able to protect themselves. That is why the law plays such an important role in directing us towards respect for values that offer equal protection to all members of our society.
The Green Paper sets out several possible strategies for Irish law to adopt. They range from a constitutional amendment excluding abortion on the one hand to a constitutional amendment permitting wide-ranging abortion on the other. It acknowledges in para.5.02 that, of the 10,000 submissions which it received "the vast majority" expressed a wish for a referendum seeking to achieve an absolute prohibition on abortion.
It also received a petition bearing 36,500 signatures requesting a referendum on these lines. It seems clear that this is also the view of the wider electorate. Opinion polls taken at regular intervals over the past seven years have shown majority support for this solution.
The Green Paper quotes without comment a number of suggested draft wordings, including two put forward by the Pro-Life Campaign to advance the analysis. The Green Paper does not seek to contradict directly the approach of the Medical Council in its ethical guidelines on abortion. It does, however, make the following curious argument in para 7.25:
"It is possible that the ethical guidelines currently in force may be changed in the future, for example to reflect a different, more liberal ethical approach or to take account of developments in medical practice. An explicit constitutional prohibition on direct termination of pregnancy would circumscribe the Medical Council's freedom to draw up guidelines as it considered appropriate, if it sought to adopt a more liberal approach."
This argument is a strange and unconvincing one for two reasons. First, if disparity between the Medical Council's ethical guidelines and the law is a source of concern, then the present disparity which results from the Supreme Court's defective understanding of medical matters should be cause for greater alarm - requiring resolution by way of constitutional amendment - rather than a hypothetical disparity.
Secondly, the idea that ethical guidelines could change because of the adoption of what is called "a different, more liberal, ethical approach" proves - if proof were needed - that the Government recognises that what underlies the contemporary international phenomenon of abortion is a shift in values relating to the human rights of unborn children.
What is being hypothesised here by the Government is that Irish doctors will be affected by these international cultural shifts rather than by clinical considerations.
The Pro-Life Campaign has consistently pressured the Government to take two steps: legal and social. The legal step is to give effective legal protection to existing medical practice in Irish hospitals where pregnant women and their babies receive care that is of the highest international standard - safer than in countries where abortion is widely practised.
The second step is social: to make it easier and more attractive for women with crisis pregnancies to make decisions that protect the lives of their unborn babies.
The Trinity College study identifies several factors which impact on women's decisions to have an abortion rather than face a future that appears dismal. Improvements in social support, housing, educational opportunities, the employment environment and child-care, and new models of "open adoption" which reduce the pain of secrecy, abandonment and finality, all need to be implemented. Ireland is now a rich country. The excuses for lack of action carry no credibility.
Our policy-makers - and the electorate as the ultimate authority for policy - should take a broad approach which keeps sight of the full human dimension. The international rush to embrace abortion is short-sighted, unable to acknowledge the humanity of unborn children and their right to life.
Having debated the issue for nearly two decades in Ireland, our electorate has a detailed understanding of the medical, legal and social dimensions. Now is the time for calm and respectful public discussion leading to a referendum giving the electorate its democratic entitlement to resolve the constitutional issue, at the same time as urgently developing social and economic policies that will ease the position for women with crisis pregnancies.
William Binchy, Regius Professor of Laws at Trinity College Dublin, is legal adviser to the Pro-Life Campaign
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