Cloning story a blow to change on abortion

On Sunday, Emily O'Reilly reported in the Sunday Business Post that Ogra Hizbollah (aka Youth Defence, aka the Mother and Child Campaign) is planning to mount a billboard campaign in the next fortnight, attacking a key element of the Government's abortion proposals. The focus of the campaign will be on embryo research. Along with Dana Rosemary Scallon, the Mother and Child Campaign believes the Government's definition of abortion as the destruction of the embryo after implantation, rather than from the moment of conception, delberately leaves the door open to biotechnological research. The slogan for the planned posters is "Don't let them legalise experimentation on babies".

You could just imagine the Government's handlers smirking as they read the story. If that's the best the right-wing critics could come up with, why worry? All that stuff about the Government's Bill being a conspiracy to allow biotechnology companies here to exploit embryos for stem-cell research is harmlessly far-fetched, isn't it? With one wing of the Opposition hung up on science fiction paranoia, the job of pushing through a face-saving political formula is half done.

And then, within hours, the online Journal of Regenerative Medicine was announcing that a private biotechnology company in the US had produced the first cloned human embryo. Moreover, the explanatory statements from the company, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), could almost have been designed to substantiate the fears of the hard-line anti-abortion groups.

On American television, its chief executive Michael West said the cluster of six cloned cells which ACT had produced "would have had the potential to become a human being if it had been implanted in a woman's womb". Because it had not been implanted, however, the cluster was not human life. He was making precisely the distinction that right-wing critics believe to be embodied in the Government's proposals. What might have seemed to be an abstract, technical objection has suddenly become immediate and tangible.

No one with any sense of the way the abortion debate has gone in Ireland should be in the least bit surprised at this kind of development. Its whole history since the early 1980s has been characterised by a fundamental mismatch between intentions and outcomes, between apparently neat verbal formulae and the inescapable messiness of the issue itself. Anti-abortion campaigners have been trying to achieve, through the Constitution, a set of permanent principles. But this permanence is simply not available in the political, legal, medical and behavioural worlds in which the question of abortion has to be situated. The great uncertainty principle of all politics - events - will always intrude.

The fallacy of believing that a formula of words can remain static in the face of events should have been obvious to anyone who lived through the unravelling of the final solution of 1983 in the X case. The moral of that case was that intentions don't really matter. Assurances about the effect of a particular piece of legislation are, in this area, meaningless. The advantage this time is that this lesson has been delivered before, rather than after, the referendum.

The Mother and Child Campaign is almost certainly wrong about the Government's intentions. The reason abortion is being defined as the destruction of the embryo after implantation is obvious enough, and it has nothing to do with biotechnological experiments. It is simply to protect the availability of contraceptives like the IUD and the morning-after pill.

Yet where Dana and the Mother and Child Campaign are right is that the Government's intentions are largely irrelevant. The definition of abortion does have implications for embryo research, and those implications have become much more concrete now that embryo cloning is becoming a scientific reality.

Thus, even before the Government's legislation has passed the committee stage in the Dβil, events are playing their part. Isn't it entirely predictable that the extraordinarily complex and entirely untried mechanism the Government is using will remain at the mercy of such unforeseen events? Mary Harney has now stated twice that the referendum should not proceed unless there is a broad consensus in favour of the Government's proposals.

It seems highly unlikely at this stage that such consensus is or will be on offer. There are at least four different positions with significant support: the absolutism of the Dana/Youth Defence faction; the relative pragmatism of the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign; the soft liberals who would allow abortion in some limited circumstances; and the small but growing pro-choice lobby. Instead of pursuing the mirage of consensus, the real question that should be asked is how to proceed in the absence of consensus.

There is one constructive, if unusual option: a non-binding consultative referendum. Put these four basic options, and perhaps a few others, to the people, asking them to indicate which comes closest to their views on the subject. The result would tell us whether a consensus is possible, and if not, where it might eventually be found. The debate, because it would not be polarised into simple Yes and No options, could be civilised and nuanced. And Bertie Ahern could fulfil his promise to hold a referendum without throwing us all into another minefield of unexpected consequences.

fotoole@irish-times.ie