Despite the deep, and often passionately-held, convictions at both extremes of the abortion debate, the Government's Green Paper has been received positively by almost all sections of opinion. It sets out the issues with clarity, and provides many factual data for rational debate.
There is nothing surprising about the fact that opinion is divided on this issue. Such a division exists in every country, and widely divergent approaches have been adopted by legislators in different parts of the world.
The simple fact is that at the beginning of the process that creates human life, that which exists is something to which even the Catholic Church does not seek to accord protection - while at the end of the process there is a live human baby, the survival of which everyone seeks to safeguard. In between these two points there is a virtual continuum. No stage of this continuum offers a clear-cut point that could provide an unarguable basis for protective action.
It is not surprising that many people, and the Catholic Church in particular, have chosen to take their stand at the beginning of the process, arguing against any post-fertilisation intervention to terminate the process of conception. The extent to which departure from this position has led to eventual acceptance of abortion on demand up to a very late stage of pregnancy, when a live and potentially viable baby exists, offers little encouragement to depart from this principled stance.
Yet taking a stand at that point - or even at the next, and arguably more defensible, point, viz fertilisation - creates some real dilemmas. For, if at some stage thereafter there emerges a threat to the life of the mother through continuation of the pregnancy, it is impossible to defend the protection of the foetus at the expense of that life. And it is not easy to accept the dogmatic assurance of some committed campaigners that this dilemma can never arise in practice, given the existence of contrary medical advice. Inevitably there will be those who will argue that at the very early stage of pregnancy what has come into existence should not be given absolute protection against potentially serious damage to the health of the mother, or that at that early stage abortion should be allowed in cases where the pregnancy has resulted from rape or incest, or where the foetus is certain to develop into a baby with grave mental or physical defects. It is understandable that many people attach some importance to this question of the stage of pregnancy at which it is terminated. Even those who hold an absolutist position about life beginning at fertilisation must find late abortions more abhorrent than action taken to terminate a pregnancy at the very outset.
In this connection it is certainly disturbing that whereas only 11 per cent of women resident in England and Wales had abortions after 13 weeks of pregnancy, the percentage in the case of Irish residents is at least twice as high.
The Green Paper is confusing on this point. Having quoted in Par. 5.37 several studies giving figures of 30 per cent and 40 per cent for abortions on Irish residents carried out after the first trimester, subsequently, in Appendix 2 it states that only 20 per cent have abortions after 12 weeks. These divergent figures need to be reconciled.
But even the lowest of these figures for late Irish abortions gives considerable ground for concern, and such concern has led some who are opposed in principle to abortion to have doubts about the practical wisdom of our present stance on abortion. For the need to travel to another State must be a contributory factor to the much higher proportion of abortions on Irish-resident women being undertaken at such a late stage.
We are, of course, unfortunate in having as our nearest neighbour a country which effectively permits abortion on demand and which allows terminations to take place as late as the 24th week of pregnancy. Many other countries either limit abortion to the first 12 or 13 weeks or apply stricter criteria to abortions undertaken after that time-limit. One does not need to agree with any of the above concerns to recognise the good faith of many morally-sensitive people who on these various grounds doubt the wisdom and prudence of aspects of our current abortion policy. Denouncing as murderers people who have come to hold such positions is totally unacceptable.
OF course, it is equally unreasonable to condemn as backwoodsmen those who view the evolution of life after fertilisation or implantation as such a continuous process that no subsequent line can be firmly drawn and who, in the light of the abortion laws of neighbouring countries, fear that by conceding early abortion in hard cases of the kind just mentioned, they could be opening the way to abortion on demand.
What we have all had to learn since this issue first intruded on the political scene 18 years ago is that it raises enormously complex moral issues to which it is inherently difficult to find solutions that will command general acceptance. Mistakes made by politicians in the past 18 years - and I was among the first to make such mistakes - do not justify condemning today's political leaders for moving cautiously. Such caution is all the more justified by the moral absolutism of many who claim for themselves an exclusive title to a "pro-life" role, and of others who, in the name of "a woman's right to choose", seek with equally absolute assurance to dismiss as irrelevant the very real moral issue of protecting emerging human life.
The Green Paper contains useful data on the abortion laws of other countries and also on what is actually happening at present in terms of abortions to Irish women in England and Wales. These latter data, set out in Appendix 2, must, however, be in some measure incomplete, for some Irish women securing abortions in Britain may give English rather than Irish addresses, and some others - although probably relatively few - may go to Scotland or continental countries such as Denmark for this purpose. Nevertheless, these figures provide what might be described as a lower boundary to the present scale of abortions performed on women normally resident in this State. What the Green Paper does not do, however, is set these data clearly in the context of the current level of live births in this State. The table below presents this information, I think for the first time, thus enabling us to see the approximate scale of current Irish abortion practice in the case of both marital and non-marital pregnancies, and in relation to both first and later pregnancies.
This table shows that at least one in 10 pregnancies in our State is now aborted. This represents over one-quarter of non-marital pregnancies, as well as 1.8 per cent of marital pregnancies. The 25 per cent proportion of non-marital pregnancies aborted does not vary significantly with age, although in 1996 it was higher, at 30 per cent, for both the under-20s and the over-40s. For marital pregnancies in that year the proportion aborted was around 1 per cent for most age groups, but 2.2 per cent for the 35-39 cohort.
The vast bulk of abortions are first abortions, over 90 per cent. Relating this proportion to the total number of first births, we find that three out of every eight non-marital first pregnancies are now aborted in England or Wales - a horrifyingly high proportion.
Table 1
Marital Non-Marital Total
Total Births 38,418 15,133 53,551
Abortions* 700** 5,192** 5,892
Total Pregnancies 39,118 20,325 59,443
Abortion Percentage 1.8 25.5 9.9
First Births 11,227 7,989 20,216
First Abortions* c.637 c.4,725 c.5,362
Total First Pregnancies c.11,864 c.12,714 c.24,576
First Abortion Percentage 5.4 37.2 21.4
Other Births 27,191 7,144 34,335
Other Abortions* c.63 c.467 c.530
Total Other Pregnancies c.27,254 c.7,611 c.34,865
Other Abortion Percentage .2 6.1 1.5
* Abortions in England and Wales to women giving Irish addresses.
** These figures are based on the fact that in 1996 11.9 per cent of these abortions were to married women. (Green Paper, Appendix 2. Table 2)
90 to 92 per cent of abortions are first abortions (Green Paper Par. 6.07). For the purpose of this Table it is, therefore, assumed that 91 per cent of both marital and non-marital abortions in 1998 were first abortions.