In 1992 the Irish electorate refused to outlaw abortion where a woman's life rather than health was at risk. The people refused to outlaw abortion where women were suicidal. Had legislators paid attention to voters, rather than lobby groups, they might have concluded a majority wanted them to introduce compassionate legislation in line with the case of 14-year-old Miss X. They didn't.
Their failure to develop a social and legislative context means that the number of Irish abortions keeps rising. Over 42,000 further abortions happened between 1993 and 2000; many health professionals believe the figure is conservative. Blanket anti-abortionists, however, seem prepared to tolerate that trend.
Worse of all is the rate of late abortions which distinguishes Irish citizens from their European peers. The appalling vista anti-abortionists told us we would avoid became a fact of life, and sometimes possibly death, in Irish abortion case studies.
What is a tolerable level of abortions? Anti-abortion groups point out that Irish abortions are still fewer, proportionately, than British abortions. This is not a matter for congratulations. Complacency is no response to an abortion rate of one in 10 pregnancies, or to a late-abortion rate determined largely by geographic and economic factors.
Perhaps it is pointless to wonder how high the abortion number must reach before anti-abortionists agree to make realistic, holistic, reproductive health services a priority. Never! Never! Never! to borrow Ian Paisley's words?
Yet the NIMBY (Never In My Back Yard) approach is heaving under the weight of evidence. Men and women shamed into remaining anonymous endure the consequences. The changing nature of the abortion debate means that those on the anti-choice side now tolerate Irish abortions, provided they happen outside Ireland, while those on the pro-choice side find the numbers intolerable.
Late abortions mean far greater medical risks to the woman and far greater ethical problems in relation to the foetus. British doctors who permit them give them priority for very good reasons, irrespective of nationality.
Just as it is naive to assume a 2001 electorate would abandon the wishes of 1992 voters, it is naive to underestimate the rising levels of frustration among education and community workers and health professionals about the Irish abortion crisis.
If the people's decision to give X a choice in her own country had been respected after the 1992 referendum, access to non-directive counselling and safe, locally available abortion could well have reduced the figures.
Good education, accessible reproductive health services and the personal care of Irish doctors, nurses and professional counsellors, supported in their difficult task by the rest of us, could have made a difference.
However, the anti-abortionists' veto denied them the chance of trying to make the situation better. In various configurations they opposed age-appropriate sex education in schools. They continue to resist education about contraceptives other than abstinence, even in AIDS cases, and argue against attempts to regulate pregnancy counselling to a professional standard.
THE effect on Irish educators, professional counsellors and community and health workers is that they are prevented from doing the job they can, and must watch the situation develop outside their expert care. So they watch how Irish women tend to avoid pregnancy counselling because the Government refuses to make it non-directive.
They watch women who could have had early terminations or stayed pregnant given good support travel to Britain for late abortions because they have neither the help nor the money to do things differently.
Irish women in those circumstances suffer levels of depression far higher than their British peers as a direct result of having abortions outside Ireland, and having their experience excluded within Ireland. Women who have late abortions face the same risk of post-natal depression as women who have given birth.
The spin some anti-abortionists put on this tries to persuade us that women's depression is a punishment they must inevitably suffer. It is not. Only a small minority of women experience any long-term psychological consequences after abortion, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' guideline.
Conversely, long-lasting, negative effects on both mothers and their children are reported where abortion has been denied.
A country as relatively small as ours, with ties as strong as we somehow manage to retain, can act as a supportive family structure to men and women facing crisis pregnancy, and can reduce the numbers of abortions if we determine to try in a realistic way.
Desperate to retain their veto, some anti-abortionists now label rape and incest victims, along with anyone who is pro-choice, as supporters of the Most Oppressed Gender Ever syndrome. This claims that women blame crisis pregnancy on oppression and victimisation by misogynistic males. Tell that to the fathers, brothers, boyfriends or husbands of a woman in crisis if you dare.
Women in crisis pregnancy have loved men well, if not always wisely. And decent Irish men love all these women in return.
mruane@irish-times.ie