The question is whether to go forward on the basis of consensus or destroy it in another futile referendum battle

For the weary veterans of the fierce abortion battles of the 1980s and early 1990s, the publication of the all-party Oireachtas report this week seems to signal the start of a third phase of a moral civil war.

Though the tone of the report is calm and thoughtful, it shows political and public opinion to be as sharply divided as ever. Consensus on the fundamental issues is simply not in prospect.

Yet, behind that stark reality, reactions to the report show some immense changes since the first abortion referendum of 1983. If enough attention is paid to those changes, real progress can be made.

The most extraordinary shift is one that has hardly been commented on at all because it is largely uncontroversial. The committee unanimously recommends a plan to reduce the number of crisis pregnancies.

This plan is part of each of the three options put forward by the major political parties. In accepting the third of these options, put forward by Fianna Fail, the Pro-Life Campaign is supporting it. Yet the plan itself is one that would have been anathema to the social conservatives who were behind the 1983 amendment.

In the late 1970s, when the notion of putting an anti-abortion clause into the Constitution was being developed, the initiative came from small groups of conservative activists.

Their concern was not just with abortion, but with a range of social trends which they regarded as destructive of traditional values. They saw an anti-abortion amendment not just as an end in itself, but as one battle in a war that was also being fought over divorce and, in particular, contraception.

As John O'Reilly, perhaps the most important single figure in the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign, put it in 1983: "The success of the campaign would serve to halt the permissive tide in other areas."

Mr O'Reilly explicitly linked abortion and contraception as twin evils: "From a nation where there was practically no contraception and absolutely no abortion 15 years ago, we have now come to the point where we have freely available contraceptives, even in our third-level colleges, and we are aborting babies to the extent at least of 5 per cent of our birth-rate."

Part of what made the 1983 abortion debate so bitter was that it was seen on both sides as a much larger struggle for power between conservatives and liberals, in which the stakes included access to contraception and divorce. This is why the most significant development this week is the quiet acceptance by the heirs of the 1983 campaigners of one of the key arguments of their opponents in that debate.

Then, liberals argued that if the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) was seriously concerned about rising abortion rates, it should be supporting broad access to contraception and sex education. This week PLAC's successor, the Pro-Life Campaign, quietly accepted that logic.

Even a decade ago, it would have been almost unthinkable that there would be all-party agreement on an extension of State-funded contraception services to teenagers throughout the State.

Yet the Oireachtas report states bluntly: "A plan needs to be drawn up which would provide contraceptive services in all parts of the country and to all the people who need them; the Government should introduce a national network of contraceptive provision, including a number of choices for adolescents. The emphasis should be not just on availability but also on accessibility, especially for the poor, the young and the socially deprived sections of our community."

The committee also "attaches importance to the general availability of the morning-after pill" as part of its plan to reduce the number of crisis pregnancies. To the activists behind the 1983 amendment the morning-after pill was anathema because it worked by preventing the implantation of the fertilised egg and was therefore, in their terms, an "abortifacient".

The Family Planning Act specifically prohibits the importation, sale and distribution of abortifacients, so the committee's plan requires an amendment to the Act so "any legal uncertainties that may exist in regard to it should be removed". Yet this, too, seems now to be acceptable to the mainstream anti-abortion movement.

This huge shift in the approach of the Pro-Life Campaign is probably driven more by pragmatism than by ideological change. The simple fact is that the conservative counter-revolution, of which the 1983 amendment was a key part, has failed.

Artificial contraception is a normal part of Irish life. The constitutional prohibition on divorce is not going to be reimposed. The Oireachtas committee's report is itself dramatic evidence that the centre of gravity on issues of sexual morality has shifted massively towards the modern European norm.

It is even clear from the report that there is an emerging consensus on the propriety of carrying out at least some abortions in Ireland. The report comprehensively rejects the theologically based distinction between so-called direct and indirect abortions through which the Pro-Life Campaign has maintained the myth that there are no medical grounds for abortion.

The committee's conclusion that "in the sense in which many lawyers and doctors commonly use the word, abortion may be necessary to save the life of a mother" informs each of the possible options that it presents. In broadly accepting one of those options, the Pro-Life Campaign is effectively recognising that abortion is sometimes justified, even if, of course, it declines to call it by that name.

All of this profound repositioning of the Pro-Life Campaign's stance means that, while the fundamental philosophical gulf remains unbridgeable, there is now a far greater degree of consensus on some basic issues of sexual morality than anyone could have thought possible even a decade ago. The question, then, is whether to go forward on the basis of that consensus or to destroy it in another futile referendum battle that would leave the realities unchanged.

If there is broad agreement that the problem is crisis pregnancies and broad agreement on the measures that might prevent or at least alleviate those crises, why divert all our energies into a dispute that would resolve nothing and leave everyone exhausted and embittered?

fotoole@irish-times