As the details of another child-rape unfold, with the possibility of a further legal confrontation on abortion, the first sentiments must be those of sympathy and compassion for the young girl who has been violated and brutalised. The circumstances of the assault were vicious. The living conditions of the victim and her family have been wretched. And to these cruelties must now be added pregnancy and possible embroilment in stressful legal proceedings.
The facts of the case present a shameful counterpoint to our preferred self-image as a prosperous but caring society - the image spelled out by the President, Mrs McAleese, in her inaugural address. The 13 year-old victim had been living with other members of her family at a Dublin camp site. Badly beaten by her assailant, she and her family were first intimidated from reporting the attack to the Garda. Later, after hospital treatment, she was found to be pregnant and taken into care by the health board. The other children still live in a cramped and cold caravan on the edge of the city. It is as bleak and harrowing a story as might emerge from any third world capital.
But after sympathy and compassion for the child and her family must come anger and dismay and critical self-examination. And they must come at least on two levels. First it must be asked; for how much longer will this society allow children to be raised and to live in conditions like these? And second, why with such wretchedness around us, do we persist in our preoccupation with a search for moral absolutism in an area of human experience where absolutes cannot be agreed or defined? Five years on from the infamous `X' case, there is still a mass of confusion as to the legal position on abortion. All the signs are that another child and family are to be drawn into a legal vortex similar to that which developed in the 1992 case.
The politicians are rightly blamed for failure of leadership. But their inaction has been a product of the community's mass double-think. Nobody is for abortion; everybody is pro-life. And when organisations such as SPUC urge constitutional enshrinement of these values, hardly any right-thinking individual feels at liberty to resist the concept, in the abstract as it were. Yet when it comes down to hard, individual cases that sense of moral absolutism tends to disappear. Not many people believed that the child in the `X' case should be forced to bring her pregnancy to term. Fewer still, it may be surmised, will argue that the child in this case should be compelled to endure a full pregnancy after the violence of rape and assault.
An honest and morally consistent society would recognise that there can and will be limited circumstances in which some individuals may have to choose abortion as the least of a number of evils. Such a society would provide for that limited possibility rather than creating a constitutional escape hatch through which its citizens can flee to an adjoining jurisdiction. Instead we have created a monster of legalisms, built upon a foundation of hypocrisy in which, from time to time, the young and the deprived and the vulnerable will be trapped. The coming days will tell whether the young girl, along with her family, in this instance will be thus destined to suffer. It may be that she and those responsible for her welfare will take the difficult decision to see her pregnancy through to term. Or it may be that the Eastern Health Board can find a way of resolving the issue without having to resort to the courts. But it is difficult to be other than apprehensive that we are facing into a re-run of the `X' case.