I have yet to meet a doctor, or anybody else for that matter, who is in favour of abortion. How could anybody be in favour of a process that takes human life at an early stage of its development?

Neither, of course, have I ever met anybody in favour of suicide.

There is a good analogy between suicide and abortion in the following respects.

Both involve the ending of life.

Both are innate to human behaviour and have been practised since time began.

Neither can be obliterated by law, either moral or civil. Legislation against abortion does not solve the problem. It merely makes it go elsewhere.

Where abortion is illegal and there is no ready access to legalised termination, you get back-street abortion and a high incidence of child-abandonment. We had all that in Ireland before the legalisation of abortion in the UK in 1967.

Were abortion not legal now, just an hour's journey across the Irish Sea, we would still have back-street abortion and the high maternal mortality which accompanies that practice.

The so-called pro-life approach to abortion is to criminalise it through statutory and constitutional change. And, having succeeded in doing that, its proponents then want to present Ireland to the rest of the world as "a haven where all life is sacred from the moment of conception", to use their own phrase.

Apart altogether from the crass hypocrisy of such a pose, it does nothing at all to reduce abortion demand. Following the successful eighth amendment to our Constitution, the so-called pro-life amendment in 1982, the number of women going to the UK for abortions each year rose steadily.

So, while other European countries such as Finland and the Netherlands had a falling abortion rate, ours was rising and continues to rise. But the consequences of the pro-life stamp-it-out approach gets even worse. The real legacy of the eighth amendment is the legalisation of abortion in Ireland today as implied by the X case ruling.

Had there not been a pro-life amendment, Miss X could have gone to the UK without any reference to the Supreme Court and there would be no legalisation of abortion in Ireland by precedent.

Following the pro-life-induced X case no doctor could now be convicted in Ireland for carrying out an abortion if the doctor doing so was of the opinion that the woman would otherwise take her own life. It hardly matters that such an action is contrary to Medical Council guidelines.

Were the council to attempt to strike off a doctor who carried out an abortion in these circumstances, the doctor could find a remedy through our courts and be reinstated.

SPUC and PLAC and Doctors for Life and that whole shifting conglomerate who flatteringly refer to themselves as pro-life, must have breathed a collective deep sigh of relief this week.

Because, had the rape victim under the care of the Eastern Health Board been forced to go before the High Court for yet another ruling on the eighth amendment, the consequences of that might well have been to rule in her favour on the basis of her being a rape victim, thus adding another precedent to the legalisation of abortion here.

The alternative was to impound her until she reached full term.

What we need now is not more constitutional change. Constitutional change does nothing except present the Supreme Court with conundrums to solve at a later date, something for which they have little relish and have often said so. Surely if we have learned nothing from the past we have at least learned the pitfalls of constitutional change.

What we need now is a good dose of reality and the courage to acknowledge that we are no different from anybody else.

What is needed now is legislation.

Dr Andrew Rynne is a general practitioner in Co Kildare