The past is a curious place. In 1983, the 8th Amendment to the Constitution promised us Ireland would evolve an abortion-free culture. Some 80,000plus Irish abortions later, its proponents are struggling to justify their stand. Rather than face reality, anti-abortion advocates are now suggesting Ireland revert to the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. That would exclude the threat of suicide as grounds for termination, a position Bertie Ahern has endorsed.
The Taoiseach makes much of his women-friendly persona: he needs their votes. But he could hardly do women a worse disservice. Irish women who have abortions already suffer far greater rates of depression and shame than women in other EU countries because of the social controls used to shut them up. Banning the threat of suicide as grounds for abortion marginalises them even further.
Bertie Ahern must know that while no one wants to promote abortion as a means of contraception, the electorate is becoming aware it is not a black and white issue. The only people scorched, after all, are a group of women whose experiences are so stigmatised they are hardly likely to enter into direct debate with him. As a result of Government neglect, the abortion rate is now one in 10 of all pregnancies, with late abortions running at three times those of women in Britain, higher than any other EU country. This is directly attributable to the absence of a national strategy on abortion.
There have been 2,500 abortions in the few brief months since November's Oireachtas Report; an estimated 50 per cent of those women were too intimidated to seek help before they made their uniquely Irish journey.
They have a point. Mr Ahern's Government has ignored calls to regulate pregnancy counselling in line with professional best practice. Young girls and women are literally at the mercy of chance if they seek counselling when pregnant.
DOES the Taoiseach care? If his position became law, every daughter, sister, mother and girlfriend from Kerry to Donegal could be raped and forced to bear the rapist's child. Even if they threatened to throw themselves off the Cliffs of Moher, his position would risk their death rather than respect their distress.
A mother of three who had cancer and became pregnant unexpectedly would be forced to endure the multiply-increased risk of that cancer, due to the effect of pregnancy on her immune system. A 12-year old girl abused by an elderly relative would have to endure the full cycle of pregnancy.
Bertie Ahern's position is a chilling example of how the balance of rights between a pregnant woman and her foetus has gone tragically askew. It is also an unfortunate illustration of how politicians can forget the facts of history when it suits them. In 1860, a year before the Offences Against the Person Act was introduced, women had no vote, no right to an education, no access to the professions and no independent legal status. Their fathers, husbands or brothers owned them outright. Women were not understood as rational beings. Thus they were not entitled to take part in decisions that required rational thought. Scientists discussing the health consequences of giving girls an education argued in all seriousness that such "brain-forcing", as they called it, would lead to anaemia, and therefore damage women's reproductive capacity. The ovum had been discovered some 30 years earlier, but most people didn't believe women were anything more than incubators during pregnancy. The embryo was something independent of them, virtually from the moment of conception, and was owned by the man who generated it.
The Catholic Church had a similar view. Its insistence that life began at the moment of conception, however, only became fixed when the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was introduced, around the same time. Prior to that, thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas believed the embryo's sentience was a governing determinant of its being human.
The 1861 Act protected the rising professional classes from tradespeople who might work to similar ends. It didn't stop abortion, but merely drove it underground so respectable Victorians didn't have to face reality. If the 1983 Amendment were rolled back in favour of the 1861 Act, women would be directly liable for having abortions, and could be prosecuted as criminals. Without a statute of limitations, a ludicrous scenario could emerge whereby over 100,000 women would have to come before the Irish courts and, if found guilty, would be exposed to a sentence of ". . . penal servitude for life", as Article 58 of the Act insists.
Depending on how the Act was interpreted, anyone who helped them could be liable for criminal prosecution too. A further 100,000 men, perhaps, along with friends, relatives, and the professionals involved?
The lobby to revert to 1861 is a desperate attempt to throw sand in our eyes in the name of "respectability". But the most alarming feature of it is the Taoiseach's attitude. If you threaten suicide, your loved ones will take you seriously. But if you are pregnant, the Taoiseach wants to call your bluff.