St Brigid met a young woman who had a crisis pregnancy. Brigid was renowned for her work with fertility in all its forms. Once, a wooden altar had sprouted blossom under the force of her healing touch. Brigid prayed, then she blessed the woman, laid hands on her womb, and the foetus miraculously disappeared.
Being a force for good in crisis pregnancies can entail such interventions. It always has. While Ms Justice Laffoy's wise judgment forces us to extend even further the dreadful alphabet of the unforgiven that began with the X and C cases, it is time to ask why we continue to permit the "pro-life" lobby to perpetrate the myth that it alone represents a force for good.
Horrific and extraordinary as it is that the Aadam's Pregnancy Service so abused the rights of Miss A, Miss B and their daughters, as well as flouting the law, it is not surprising.
It is not surprising that other supporters of the same position are now engaging in a damage-limitation exercise which seeks to deny the dangerous implications of their views under the guise of improving services to women in crisis pregnancies. It is not surprising, because it is a logical consequence of rigidly enforcing that position. The belief that any ideology authorises people to make decisions that affect the choices of pregnant women, and can either coerce or override them, will always be unusually susceptible to abuse.
The same would apply if men were pregnant. Insisting that women continue pregnancies they do not want is unacceptable coercion. Insisting you know better than they what to do with their eventual child is just a few steps further along the line.
The dreadful appeal of Miss A to be given a Caesarean section delivery lest she bond with her baby shows how negative an impact the "pro-life movement" has had on less-educated and less well-off women. The embryo or foetus has been alternately sentimentalised and pathologised to a point where it becomes a monster to be feared or revered, in equally unreal measures.
The sense of alarm at being overdue that so many of us face every day is transformed into a nightmare. Because abortion is stigmatised, unwanted pregnancy is stigmatised more than it ever need be. Thus the crisis of unwanted pregnancy is worsened by the absence of honest, factual, non-judgmental information supported by locally available services.
This nightmare of darkness, where rumour and misinformation thrive, is wholly anti-life. The predatory nature of much "pro-life" propaganda - of bloody foetuses and blue-eyed, blond-haired perfect children - insults the part of us that is uniquely human. Qualities of memory and imagination are what make us wonderful and vulnerable, so our imaginations have already written the story of what such lives would be. But sentimentalising the foetus can work against encouraging full-time pregnancy as well as for it.
Some such responses are described in the very readable report commissioned by the Department of Health. There, for example, women describe their refusal to avail of any counselling service in Ireland lest they be talked out of having an abortion.
What becomes uncomfortably clear is one dominant perception, the belief that advice is biased because abortion is not available within the country is a factor which can lead to having abortions. Such is the consequence of a limited crisis pregnancy strategy. In every circumstance, women are doubly failed. We fail to inform them how life really is, and we fail to offer them the aftercare they need, whatever decision they make.
The alphabet of pain, mistakes, exceptions which prove that no absolute rule will work for crisis pregnancy will not end until we provide an inclusive pregnancy service. We have recited this alphabet long enough. We have conjugated every possible argument, except the one that matters. Abortion happens, it is a largely middle-class activity, it is restricted to those who can pay for it, and the only good we do by forcing women out of the country to end their pregnancies is to subsidise the airlines that carry them. We do not act with affection and imagination for these women. We force them to live in shame.
Not only does our self-deceit allow us to ignore them, it masks the fact that we have placed them at greater risk than they need be so we can continue to have a good opinion of ourselves, no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary. Our so-called moral stand is fostering a culture of late abortions for Irish women, and that raises health and ethical issues of substantial concern. Just as we avoid the shifting borders between life and death now provoked by the technology of life-support systems, so we also deny the debate we must have about the optimum time in which to abort an embryo, given its gestation and the woman's health.
The majoritarianism of the "pro-life" position makes pregnancy in Ireland more of a crisis than it should be. However well intentioned, it excuses behaviour which in any other situation would be condemned as undemocratic.
In this same year, men and women attending family planning clinics in Dublin were pestered by a group of "pro-lifers" who targeted them. At exactly the same time, a press campaign was waged which tried to condemn the use of contraception because it allegedly promoted the status of children as "products" not "persons". A Family Planning Clinic in Belfast was forced to close last month because of such actions.
We have become so accustomed to such intimidation that the closure was greeted with resignation instead of outrage. Among the cynical abuses of our understandably mixed feelings on abortion is the sensationalist and exploitative suggestion that encourages infertile people to believe a drop in the abortion rate would make more babies available for adoption; amplified in these pages last week by the unsupported claim that mothers who give their babies up for adoption are unfairly stigmatised.
In fact, it took years to abolish the legal status of illegitimacy so as to create social conditions where crisis pregnancy and single parenthood did not consign women and children to the margins of society and beyond. We should celebrate that change, even while acknowledging such families swop the stigma of illegitimacy for that of socio-economic losers. Meanwhile, we need focus on infertility research.
It is time to grow up. To those who have secret abortions outside this community, let us wish you in the near future the acknowledgment you deserve for carrying the burden of our shortcomings.
Remember St Brigid, she who could make barren women fertile, while so blessedly disappearing the unwanted embryo from a young girl's womb.