Half a million Irish people at least are related to someone who has had an abortion. For all those voters, the tome produced by the all-party Oireachtas committee will weigh even heavier on their hearts than it does in their hands. The report looks backwards, and with only one eye forwards. It offers little to console 6,500 people who travel abroad for abortions each year.
The least unrealistic proposal made is to legislate for the X case context by providing safe, legal abortion where the woman's life is at risk of suicide. Twice, the courts have taken such a situation seriously, and judges have urged legislators to recognise this reality. But the majority of the committee's politicians choose to ignore them all over again.
The reasons why say more about the prejudices operating in this area than some of us wish to acknowledge. Broadly summarised, women threatening suicide are not believed. If they do commit suicide, or seriously damage themselves, fundamentalists can rest assured no abortion has taken place for semantic reasons.
The Attorney General indicated already that where a woman alleged she was raped her accused would have to remain presumed innocent until conviction - i.e. long after she would have gone to full term. Pregnancy as a result of alleged incest presumably falls short of the same legal certainties. The net effect is to seriously undermine women's credibility and ethical maturity on all pregnancy-related issues. Their experiences and their decisions are effectively denied.
Reading the report and its recommendations, it is hard not to conclude that the dominant concern is to "cover" the medical and political professions. As long as they are protected, individual women must find their own way. Even hard case scenarios were not credited by many anti-abortion supplicants before the committee: if rare medical conditions arise, delivering the foetus prematurely is apparently not the same semantically as aborting it.
The real ethical challenges of the debate are largely ignored in this report, despite evidence before the committee. With late abortions running at three times the British rate, Ireland must face up to the inherent difficulties of equating all abortions after conception as having the same value. It is not the same to terminate a pregnancy at 23 weeks as it is at seven weeks. You don't need a degree in ethics to know that.
Nor is it possible to reduce abortion rates significantly without offering a benchmark on abortion. The Department of Health's report on crisis pregnancy clearly articulates the way women avoid going to counsellors in Ireland for fear the service is already prejudiced. Without a local benchmark, the relevant one applying is the British Abortion Act, which is among the most liberal in Europe. Is 24 weeks the benchmark Irish society wants to adopt?
Even where a benchmark said abortion was permissible in Ireland on certain very restricted terms, Irish men and women would have a clear guideline against which to measure their sexual and reproductive activity. Some would still travel abroad for abortions, but the presence of a local benchmark would inevitably focus people's minds on what they are doing, and when.
Taking a political stand which says abortion is wrong in all circumstances fails to deal with the reality of Irish abortion, and will not change it. Abortion is part of the problem of crisis pregnancy and unquestionably part of the solution, however reduced its role becomes.
Yet the report prefers to change the world before it tackles the reality of abortion. This is unusually idealistic for normally pragmatic Irish politicians. Changing the world is a tall order, as anyone who wants to knows. Here, it means setting up a crisis pregnancy agency to devise better contraceptive, educational and counselling/medical services across the board.
A special agency may eventually succeed in reducing the numbers of crisis pregnancies, or reducing the sense of crisis in which the pregnancy develops. That does not necessarily entail reducing the numbers and rates of abortion.
The initiative represents a significant political trade-off with anti-abortion groups because contraception and widespread availability of the morning-after pill are officially anathema to them. Astonishingly, most of those groups omitted reference to contraception in their submissions. When challenged by committee members, they either said it was a minor element in the overall scheme, or denied its relevance to their fundamental concerns. Thus, contraception was set up as the price of negotiation some 20 years after it was recognised legally.
The corrosive linkage between abortion and adoption is one of the saddest aspects of crisis pregnancy - so many people wanting babies, so many others not wanting pregnancy. The difficulty in pairing such sadnesses is that it misses the point that women in some crisis pregnancies don't want the pregnancy in the first place. What disturbs me most in this report is how the individual woman is surgically dissected into bits and pieces over which others argue theory. Her humanity is reduced into parcels labelled social, medical, economic and educational.
Whichever way the fragments fall, she is denied her specific response to social and economic realities, strands of experience that otherwise come first in Irish life. Ignoring its developmental status and viability equally compromises the humanity of the embryo or foetus. Such core denial dooms this report to failure.
The Irish electorate will not pass an amendment that ignores reality. Their compassion after the X case confirms their deep concern for women in crisis, and their ability to understand this is not a black and white issue.
Politicians would do well to remember that in the secrecy of the ballot box no one looks over a voter's shoulder. And with half a million people involved directly through almost 100,000 women who had abortions since 1980, a silent but supportive majority may finally force their hand.
mruane@irish-times.ie