In his judgment in the High Court yesterday, Mr Justice Geoghegan responded humanely and with great clarity to the harrowing set of circumstances facing a pregnant 13-year-old rape victim. In confirming the District Court decision in the case - and ruling against an appeal lodged by her parents - the High Court found that the termination of the pregnancy authorised by the District Court was lawful under the Constitution. Barring a further appeal by her parents to the Supreme Court, the girl will not now have to endure a full pregnancy; she is free to travel to Britain for an abortion.
This was a comprehensive and wholly logical judgment placed firmly within the parameters of the Supreme Court's judgment in the X case. Mr Justice Geoghegan accepted evidence from psychiatrists and found that, as a matter of probability, there was a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of C which would only be avoided by the termination of her pregnancy. He could not see how any judge could have avoided the same conclusion. At this writing, the expectation is that the legal endeavours designed to subvert the girl's own wishes - and to prevent her travelling to Britain - may be at an end.
In all of this, there is the familiar sense that the courts have extricated this State, indeed this society, from some awkward choices on abortion. The girl's abortion - like thousands of others involving Irish women every year - will be performed in Britain while this State keeps its distance. It is, as Dick Walsh observes on the facing page, a strange kind of morality, one that appears to be governed by geography.
But the C case, in which a 13-year-old living in squalor on a Dublin camp site was viciously raped and assaulted, is a forceful reminder of the inherent dilemmas which cannot be avoided when legislating on the abortion issue. If there is a lesson, it is the one that we might have absorbed at the time of the X case; that we cannot deal with a profoundly complex moral and ethical issue like abortion with moral absolutism.
The honest and logical approach would be to recognise in the laws of this State that there is a limited range of circumstances in which abortion will be seen by some pregnant women as the lesser of two evils. Instead, the Government is fumbling on the issue. There is to be a Green Paper which will be referred to the All-party Committee on the Constitution. The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, says that the Government intends to move slowly and deliberately on such a complex issue; another referendum on abortion is unlikely to take place before 1999.
It appears that we have learned nothing from the X case or indeed the C case. There is the familiar search for some kind of compromise on an issue which is not amenable to any middle ground; there is the familiar absence of political leadership on the issue; there is the familiar moral ambiguity on abortion.