A new organisation, Abortion Reform, will be launched by "prochoice" groups this autumn, to coincide with the publication of the Government's Green Paper on abortion, which is expected to trigger a long and heated debate. If the Green Paper is published before September as the Minister for Health, Mr Cowen, has hinted, there seems little doubt that the opponents of abortion are the better organised. Certainly, the Pro-Life Campaign, whose honorary president is Senator Des Hanafin, has a higher profile than the pro-choice Dublin Abortion Rights Group, identified publicly with Prof Ivana Bacik of Trinity College Dublin.
The PLC is helped by having a single, clear demand to campaign for: that the Taoiseach make good on a pre-election promise to hold a referendum on abortion.
According to a PLC spokesman who does not want to be named, Mr Ahern "indicated it would be in 1999. There's an expectation that he will deliver. If he doesn't, the pro-life groups are going to be very, very annoyed with that."
Prof Bacik says Abortion Reform, which will be the main opposition to PLC, will be "a broad-based pro-choice movement."
The leading organisation putting Abortion Reform together is the Irish Family Planning Association. Last week, the IFPA said it was not yet in a position to make public statements. "We would prefer not to be mentioned," a spokeswoman said. "We are not quite ready."
This will change dramatically from September when the media battle gets under way. Just what tone that battle will take, nobody knows; but few would bet that it will be anything other than acrimonious and at times, bitter.
Among the few things on which the PLC spokesman and Ivana Bacik agree is their desire for a campaign free from bitterness, and their doubts that this will happen.
The PLC spokesman believes that the longer the Government puts off taking action after the Green Paper is published, the more heated the debate is likely to become. "If they drag the situation out for 18 months they will just leave the situation wide open for different groups to do different things," he says.
Ivana Bacik says, "I hope there will be a reasonable, middle-ground argument. However, the anti-abortion side were the most violent and unreasonable in the past."
It is hard to see where the middle ground will lie. The PLC wants a referendum to ban abortion and does not accept that there are realistic circumstances in which pregnancy could endanger the life of the mother.
Prior to the 1992 Supreme Court ruling in the X case - which conferred a right to abortion where the mother's life is in danger - "medical practice was not interfered with but there was an understanding that there was a total prohibition," says the PLC spokesman.
His statement echoes the previously articulated anti-abortion view that there is a fundamental difference between conducting a medical procedure to save the life of a mother which has the unintended consequence of aborting the foetus, and a procedure in which an abortion is carried out to save the life of the mother. Getting this distinction across in the era of the sound-bite will be no easy task for anti-abortion campaigners.
These subtleties are unlikely to worry Youth Defence. Founded in March 1992 at the height of the public furore over the X case, Youth Defence has become known for picketing politicians' homes and clinics of organisations it believes promote abortion.
It advocates a referendum on a form of wording which would allow no possibility of abortion. This is a position which seems unlikely to find favour with the electorate, tens of thousands of whom have had abortions in England.
But the Dublin Abortion Rights Group's belief that, in the words of Ivana Bacik, "a woman should be entitled to an abortion whenever she needs one", may be a step too far for the electorate too.
It is one thing to vote in a referendum - as the electorate did in 1992 - for women to have the right to travel to England for an abortion. It is quite another to vote to have abortions performed in, say, Holles Street Hospital.
While the anti-abortion groups are determined to get a referendum, the Dublin Abortion Rights Group and, in all likelihood, Abortion Reform, will fight for legislation to give effect to the Supreme Court decision in the X case. The DARG would see that as the minimum that should happen.