It is an astonishing situation. My submission to the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution may be the only one which favours retaining the present legal situation on abortion.

To my knowledge, this is the first print or electronic (RTE also excluded in this respect) offering which favours that position. Yet the most recent survey found that about 30 per cent of our electorate support that view.

It may be that their support owes much to war-weariness. They may not relish yet another media rerun of pro- and anti-abortion arguments, with the same voices truculently making the same points, egged on by questions and remarks designed to evoke debate rather than discussion. I certainly do not relish the thought of such a rerun.

All such debating gets off to a false start, as many debates do, by positing the status quo in terms which are incorrect. Recently in this newspaper three distinguished political and legal staff writers were at one in saying that at present "abortion is lawful where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother". That is not true.

Nowhere in our laws or their Supreme Court interpretations is the word "abortion" mentioned and defined. The interpretations refer to pregnancy terminations. Abortions are excluded. Abortions always end the lives of unborn babies. Terminations do not do so always, as when, for example, babies are delivered by Caesarean section. Terminations deprive babies of their life support in wombs. They are like depriving PVS (persistent vegetative state) people of life-support services. Abortions are like giving PVS people fatal injections. They are utterly, totally illegal here.

We are talking, then, about retaining the present legal situation on pregnancy terminations. The Green Paper on Abortion states: "A termination is lawful if it is established, as a matter of probability, that there is a real and substantial risk which could be averted only by the termination of her pregnancy." In summary: "Pregnancies may be terminated when necessary to save mothers' lives." The key word is "necessary", that is, there is no known alternative way to save the mother's life.

That is how the present legal position should be summarised when it is referred to in news and comment articles and on such as RTE: pregnancy terminations are legal here when necessary to save mothers' lives. What is wrong with retaining that status quo?

The Green Paper presents the pros and cons for seven legal options related to abortion. Option three, "Retention of the Status Quo", gets above 5 per cent of the paper and about 90 per cent of that bit is given to the "cons" arguments. The three-quarters of a sentence given to the "pros" is most half-hearted.

The reality is that by limiting pregnancy terminations to those necessary to save mothers' lives, we in this part of Ireland not only exclude abortions, but we also make our State the safest place in the world for pregnant women and their unborn babies.

Of course, it leaves legal and medical loose ends which may be exploited by fallible and/or biased mothers, doctors and judges. It may also result in Irish babies being killed in British (including shortly, maybe, Northern Ireland) abortion clinics. But the fact remains that its very loose ends are highly anti-abortion because of their deterrent effect.

It will not satisfy anti-abortion extremists who mistakenly assume that laws exist to eliminate undesirable behaviour. All laws may ever do is minimise such behaviour. That is exactly, I suggest, what our status quo does on abortion.

Furthermore, I suggest that the status quo is as much help as we Catholics can ever hope to get from civil laws in this respect, and on that account I am much puzzled by the stance of the Archbishop of Dublin. That stance, and that of other Catholics who are looking for another referendum on the issue, remind me of the Northern Ireland politicians whose insistence on IRA decommissioning had delayed so much the normalisation of politics in that area. They are not content with the fact to which Gerry Adams has referred for a long time now: "The guns are silent." Similarly, our status quo excludes abortions. What more do we want?

Indeed, just as the decommissioning hold-up has delayed local measures for development and justice in the North, so, too, the Catholic focus on another referendum has delayed Catholic measures to minimise unplanned pregnancies.

Over 30 years ago, in the mid-1960s, I got involved in public discussions on contraception. When in 1968 Humane Vitae confirmed the retention of the Catholic position, I used my Sunday Independent column to say that it was now "up to the men" to play their part by regulating sex urges for happiness, rather than unhappiness, here and hereafter.

I implied that it was up to Catholic preachers to motivate for that purpose. They have failed in that respect, in large part, and continue to fail. That, I submit, rather than another referendum, should be our urgent Catholic concern as we enter the third Christian millennium.

Joseph F. Foyle is an economist and current affairs commentator