Imperfect but honourable bid to protect life

A Friend faxed me a chapter from Tom Heskith's book on the 1983 referendum, The Second Partitioning of Ireland? Part of her motivation may have been that I had admitted on the national airwaves that I had been so apolitical in the early 1980s that all the fuss about that referendum had passed me by.

I found the chapter riveting, because as they say, it was déjà vu all over again. "We believe that this amendment could kill women," said anti-amendment spokepeople. The Tanaiste, Dick Spring, said changes in medical practice would threaten the lives of hundreds of women. Anti-amendment campaigners claimed that the morning-after pill and the IUD would be under threat. Heskith states baldly: "The anti-amendment campaign's central plank was uncertainty."

The fact that women did not die at all does not prevent people making the same claim 20 years later. The fact that we have, despite a ban on abortion, an exemplary maternal mortality rate which is far better than Britain's may as well not have happened as far as these campaigners are concerned.

The claim of a physical threat to women's lives does not stand up and has been largely abandoned by No campaigners. So now they are concentrating their fire on the removal of suicide as a grounds for abortion. It has been stated baldly by No campaigners that this reduces women's right to life, that women will die if this amendment is passed.

This is as spurious a claim as the assertion in 1983 that hundreds of women's lives would be under threat.

No one has explained how offering a procedure which carries a higher risk of suicide after it than before enhances a woman's right to life. If a cancer specialist treated breast cancer with a therapy which significantly increased the risks of having breast cancer afterwards, he would be considered negligent in the extreme.

Yet when psychiatrists insist that the option of abortion should be open to suicidal women, this is somehow laudable. This is in spite of the fact that research shows that suicide is a significant risk after abortion. Not one psychiatrist, whether for or against the amendment, has said that abortion constitutes treatment. One of the No campaigners, the psychiatrist Tom Fahey, admitted that abortion was not a treatment for anything, but he felt it could be part of a programme for some women.

Yet a clinical psychologist told me recently she does not see in her practice the women who have not had abortions, but those who have. There is much talk about the fact that the voices of women who have had abortions have been excluded from this debate. That is true, but if we listened to those voices we might hear very uncomfortable things.

We might hear women who if they felt certain that they would have been supported at home would have continued their pregnancy. We would hear women who felt that they would lose their relationship with a partner if they continued the pregnancy

. Women might tell us that they felt that the prospect of bringing a child into an uncertain future with a high risk of poverty was the wrong thing to do.

All of those scenarios are an indictment of the kind of society we now have. In each of those situations, a better option which could have meant life for both mother and child could have been worked out.

Undoubtedly there are terrible dilemmas which people face. Deirdre de Barra's painful crisis moved anyone with a shred of compassion.

As someone with a nine-month old baby, I could feel my heart lurch when I read her letter. I am lucky. I have a healthy baby. I am in no position to pass judgment on Ms de Barra's decision. I wish her and her family only the very best as they come to terms with the death of a much wanted child.

Yet there have been other voices in the past few days who have said from their own experience that even in this most heart-rending of situations there can be healing in allowing the baby whatever short span he or she might have. Those voices must also be heard.

When it comes to other levels of disability, it is important not to minimise the struggle for parents. When I was pregnant, I was full of fear. Every handicapped child I saw gave me a feeling of foreboding, as I wondered about my own ability to cope.

Yet if we begin to sanction abortion for foetal abnormalities, where do we draw the line? Most people in Ireland would shudder at the thought of abortion for Down's syndrome, but as a recent letter in this paper outlined, Belgium has dealt with the "problem" of Down's syndrome by not allowing them to be born.

Every day we see advertisements for the Special Olympics. How do the parents of those adults and children hear our debate? Raising a handicapped child is a hard station. From having lived abroad, I know it is even harder when there is an unspoken disapproval of having brought such a child into the world at all.

Not that we have any great reason for pride in how we treat those with disabilities. In this country not only do you have the grief of a child with a disability, but a struggle for years on end to secure their rights. This can and must change.

This amendment is not perfect, but this is not a perfect world. It is an honorable attempt to protect the right to life of both women and developing human beings. As such, it deserves all our support.