Sir, – Senator Ivana Bacik (Law Matters, January 28th) concludes: “To put it bluntly, women die where they do not have access to legal abortion. This is as true now as it was 40 years ago”.
To put it equally bluntly, where women do have access to legal abortion, unborn children will die where the choice of abortion is exercised. For me, therein lies the dilemma of the whole debate.
As a far-from-perfect older male and parent who never had any hang-ups about contraception, whether people lived together or were married, from where does my unease regarding abortion on demand come?
Why does it seem to me that the value placed on a pre-natal life is not held by some to be on a par with life post-natal?
From the moment of birth the Constitution and a raft of legislation vehemently protects the life and welfare of the child. This is as it should be.
But, since the 1983 constitutional provision and its interpretation by the Supreme Court in Attorney-General v X in 1992, the difficulty of balancing the right to life of the unborn with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother has been exposed. Even absent the proposed legislation to “regularise” the X judgment, surely any medical practitioner acting within the judgment parameters – given the Supreme Court’s role in constitutional interpretation – could not be open to prosecution? The real issue is that there is a campaign from some quarters to greatly widen the grounds for abortion in this jurisdiction from those identified in X.
Senator Bacik has consistently been clear in her stance on this demand. I am not so clear, but recognise where she comes from. Sooner or later we will have to grasp this nettle and that by way of a constitutional referendum, again. We cannot continue the travel option forever. Yet, my unease remains. In the interim can we just say what we really feel without being held up to ridicule and attack? – Yours, etc,