Bertie Ahern and his Government liken the abortion referendum's complex strategy to the Belfast Agreement - as an endgame to the wars about women and babies that brought such grief for so long.
The Belfast Agreement never made terrorism a constitutional crime, but if a Yes vote majority overturns the X case, suicidal women who have abortions in Ireland will be constitutional criminals. Young, raped, girls like X and C could represent a clearer constitutional danger than the men who bombed Omagh. It's a wonder we're not all mad.
"A legal formulation is not about what one personally thinks is best, or at any rate allowable," Adrian Hardiman wrote about abortion before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. "It is about what we are prepared to enforce on others, including very vulnerable people."
What the Government proposes is obligatory pregnancy for the poor and a prison sentence of 12 years if they, or anyone who helps, access abortion in Ireland. This is not theoretical. On Hardiman's reasoning, it is the key consequence we must face in this referendum, whether or how punishments will be enforced.
X and C showed it is difficult to draw clear rules in areas of complex medical and personal judgment. Yet it's not hard to imagine other complicated and agonising cases. Ought a girl be compelled to bear her father's child? Ought a mother of four in early menopause be forced to bear a child whose birth will kill her, not during pregnancy, but within a few months or years?
And what of those unable to take the boat or prevented because they are in care in, say, a psychiatric hospital to which they have been committed on a psychiatrist's certification? Must they join Dr Jim McDaid's pregnant patient who threw herself into the river, drowning like Ophelia in the murky waters of these plans?
However "cleverly drafted", Michael McDowell's Bill-within-a-Bill is no legal Shakespeare. Everything claimed when it was launched has become riddled with doubt. Even the older-generation morning-after pill is under question by the Independent Referendum Commission.
Hard cases don't make good law, but denial makes laws worse. The Medical Council would currently strike off a doctor who denies treatment to a pregnant woman at risk of imminent death from physical causes. Yet this referendum pretends that doctors need our permission to do so. The Data Protection Commission enforces our right to privacy, yet any Government Minister will be able to access women's medical files for purposes of surveillance or sheer prurience.
The potential for intimidation of healthcare professionals and women is immense, and if you think this can't happen, remember the phone tapping of journalists during another intimidating age - without the support of law.
"Extreme positions, on both sides, are often based on false simplicities," Hardiman continued. The Government's position is extreme, as well as minimalist. It ignores the Constitution Review Group and Green Paper's advice to set before the people both time limits and a means of certifying suicide risk, to be enacted if the electorate voted (again) to retain that risk.
Yet both Government and anti-abortion campaigners are challenging others to do precisely that. Their attempts at argument conveniently forget that 7,000 Irish women a year are subject to Ireland's de facto abortion standards, set by our old colonial masters and permitting abortion up to 24 weeks. When it comes to ethics, geography rules.
Attitudes to women are tellingly revealed by claims that if the amendment falls, women will have abortions right up to delivery. No wonder the devaluation of motherhood has coincided so neatly with the last 20 years' manoeuvrings. Let us be crystal clear that mothers are not their children's enemies, whether the children are born or unborn. We are, or try our best to be, their carers and their friends.
Treating abortion as intellectual entertainment for theologians and lawyers insults the gravity of the issue. On television, the leader of Ireland's obstetricians and gynaecologists, Prof John Bonnar, explained the difference between conception and implantation by reciting the beautiful words of the Hail Mary in a substitute scientific assertion about "the fruit of the womb".
In Dublin, the Masters of the maternity hospitals met to urge a Yes vote and found themselves saying they want to be allowed perform terminations on women carrying non-viable foetuses, but need another referendum to do so. This is madness.
Ordinary people are realising that medical care is not what was thought - smear tests in case pregnant women have cancer are not routine; Ireland's infant mortality rate is a significant 0.7 times higher than the EU average because women are not allowed to terminate fatally malformed foetuses here. Let us hope that Deirdre de Barra will not have to smuggle her baby's body back to Ireland in a zipper bag the way another woman in her situation did last year.
We can't stop a future harm by creating one in the present, however much utopia calls for a Yes vote to bypass our parliament, our President and our reality. A No vote gives us hope that when future cases present themselves, as they will inevitably, the law and our societal sense of ethics will be equal to the challenge. Legislating will not be easy, but no one can accuse the Irish of hypocrisy again.