Whether we like it or not, we need another referendum on abortion

‘I KNOW you don’t like being pregnant, but do you really feel bad enough to commit suicide?”

Picture it. The psychiatrist charged with signing off on an abortion because the mother says she is suicidal. This is one of the options which the expert group on abortion is reported to have given the Government if it legislates for the X case.

The idea that a psychiatrist could sit across from a pregnant woman and decide whether she should become a mother or not is an insult to our basic humanity. This is a process described as a “double lock” against abortion in the 1999 green paper on legislating for the X case.

You imagine websites springing up advising how to handle the interview with suggestions as to how to come across as suicidal. You imagine unfortunate women going in looking like Hamlet’s Ophelia in an effort to try to get the psychiatrist on board.

Oh nonsense, you’re saying. These are professionals we’re talking about. They know a suicidal woman from a woman who’s just upset.

The 1999 green paper on abortion reported that psychiatrists are wrong about suicidal intent in pregnant women 97% of the time. So what is the advantage of legislating for the X case, which would allow for abortion if it can be proved there is a “real and substantial” risk to the life of the mother, including the risk of suicide? Pro-choice activists are in favour because they believe that, in practical terms, this is abortion on demand. Just as abortion is on demand in England and Wales under the guise of being available for mental health reasons.

You can argue very cogently that a woman who is pregnant and doesn’t want to be is, de facto, a woman with mental health issues. But there is an element of falsehood about it which would be even worse if suicidal intent had to be proved. Particularly as being pregnant is reckoned to make a woman 20 times less likely to commit suicide.

Making abortion available on demand because of a constitutional amendment which was meant to ban abortion except to save a woman’s life seems a fairly dishonest way to go about our business.

If we want abortion on demand, we should say so. Put a very tight deadline on it, by all means. Ten weeks, even eight. I think this is the only dignified way to go about making abortion available for reasons other than a threat to the mother’s physical health.

I find Sinn Féin’s arguments that they would allow for abortion in cases of incest or rape — a regime in force in Spain, Germany, and Finland — stomach-turning. It is not for the legislature to play God and decide whether a woman should carry a baby or not.

Either you believe abortion should be available, which is fair enough, or you do not, which is fair enough too. The babies these victims of crime are carrying are not less human than any others.

Again, I find the idea that the State should decide what degree of disability makes a baby suitable for abortion absolutely repulsive. It sends the message that disabled babies should not be born. Friends who have gone through pregnancy in the UK have told me they were given read-outs on the condition of their babies in the early days so the hospital could say “I told you so” if a disabled baby were born.

If abortion is to be available, the pregnant woman herself should be the only judge as to when it is necessary. She should be judge and jury.

I have sympathy for expectant fathers here, but nature has no problem with gender discrimination. When a woman is carrying a baby she and the baby are one body. If she does not want to carry the baby, she can always find a way to do away with it, including doing away with herself, a backstreet abortion, or infanticide.

The question of when that potential baby becomes a human being with his or her own rights is a vexed one. Philosophically, and even biologically, I am prepared to accept that there is a full human being at the moment of conception.

However, in practice, we do not tend to mourn those millions of babies which are lost to miscarriage in the first 10 weeks or so as if they were full human beings. And unless a woman has reasons to believe she will not conceive again, she is unlikely to grieve as she would for a baby, or even for a baby who made it as far as Savita Halappanavar’s.

At 12 weeks, an informed woman knows her baby is probably going to make it, and she invests more in the pregnancy, with most beginning to chat to their babies at the time of the “quickening” — a lovely word, describing the baby’s movement in the womb.

The idea that you could ever give the fertilised egg constitutional rights equal to that of his or her mother was always mad. The great failing of the eighth amendment is that it equates the life of the mother with the life of the child even when the child has no hope of life without his or her mother.

WE COMPLAIN that there has been no legislation for the X case, but nor has there been for the eighth amendment and the reason is that it would be ridiculous. Is artificial insemination constitutional, for instance, when so many embryos are lost? Is the morning-after pill constitutional? We can’t stagger on under the terms of this amendment, passed by a referendum the holding of which Garret FitzGerald described as his biggest political mistake. We can’t even stagger on under the terms of a Supreme Court judgement made in the extreme case of the suicidal teenaged rape victim, Ms X.

We need another referendum. And, given we’re committed to referenda on matters dictated purely by spin, such as decreasing the President’s term, that shouldn’t be a problem.

We need to be given the option of deleting the eighth amendment. This would leave us with the 1861 law criminalising abortion by all means including “poison or other noxious things”. Obviously, this law needs to be brought up to date and it should be up to the legislature to change it.

Views will differ, both inside and outside the Dáil, as to whether there should be legislation for abortion for reasons other than to protect the physical health of the mother. But at least the legislature would be free of the constitutional strait-jacket which has made some of the expert group’s suggestions so insulting.

For pity’s sake, let’s not make pregnant women sit across from a psychiatrist trying to prove she’s about to throw herself and her unborn child under a bus.