In the world-view of absolute anti-abortionists, abortion is always and everywhere entirely wrong, and time and place and circumstances do not affect the issue. But many people - people in sufficient number to have carried the travel and information referendum - are plainly not absolutists. They're quiet about what they are. But the quietness of pragmatists, compared to anti-abortionists, does not mean that vivid thought and feeling is not still going into the subject. In Eastenders, a young couple have been told the baby she is carrying is extremely disabled. They've been offered a termination. There was a discussion of this dilemma on the Gerry Ryan Show last week, between Gerry and some women with experience of such children, and its humaneness and thoughtfulness took my breath away. The abortion debate isn't just about the convinced shouting at the convinced. People debate these awful questions in silence, within themselves, with the deepest seriousness.
I see that I've changed, myself, about abortion. The passage of time has affected me in the years since the issue burst upon the Irish scene. Up to then, the thought of abortion, and even the word itself, were so taboo that I could hardly articulate them even in my own mind. I still hate the word, from those days.
But I was quite clear about abortion in the abstract. I could see that when the women's movement of my time called for women to have control over their own fertility, abortion had to be included. You couldn't proclaim the fullness of women - the strength of their hearts and minds and souls, and the folly and wickedness of enslaving them through this or that code of behaviour, often called a religion - and hold that one thing back. You couldn't want women to walk the world as free and proud as they could be, and still not trust them with their own pregnancies. You had to trust women with everything.
I do trust women. Particularly on the subject of having children, and guarding children like tigers, I trust women. Women are no better or worse than men in any essential way. A proportion of women are cruel to their children and can leave them hungry or sell them into prostitution or do other terrible things to them, and walk away. But the overwhelming evidence is all the other way. Look around the world, and look at the history of the human race. The guardians of the children have been the women. If a woman comes to me and tells me that she's going to have an abortion, it is this background that makes me approach her choice with respect.
I still believe, of course, that control over her own fertility is the key to the liberation of a woman. But it seems to me increasingly urgent that we devise ways of evading crisis pregnancies in the first place, so as to really try to reduce the rate of abortion - in this part of the world, anyway, the one place we're responsible for - to as near vanishing point as possible.
Our wrangling over wordings and over individual cases of girls already pregnant is not a moral response to the problem, and it is of little practical value either. We need to move on. For myself - what I believed somewhat airily in the 1970s - that abortion was a choice made about her life, through her body, by an autonomous woman, who owed no explanation or apology to anyone, I no longer believe. I believe abortion is not a right thing, and that we should be all together, men and women, anti-abortionists and pro-choice people, in the search to eliminate it. I feel that I have a right to choose, but I also feel that to insist on a rights-based stance is not the best way forward.
I think it becomes obvious as you go along that the things in life that are outside our control - new life, health, being loved, death - are in a special category. We must approach them with whatever is the secular equivalent of reverence.
Abortion does nip life in the bud. It does prevent the formation of a unique being. It is the choking off of a potential which is quite unlike any other potential. Even at its best, having an abortion is never a positive act. But women don't do it for fun. Some anti-abortion crowd have financed big posters, and one of them shows a foetus and says something like "killing her won't solve the problem".
On one level, this is a foolish statement, since the reason why women have abortions is that they do solve problems. The most common reaction to an abortion is relief, precisely because what seemed an intractable problem has been solved. Why else would abortions ever happen, but that there is a problem and terminating the pregnancy seems like a solution?
ON another level, just as you learn to value life the more you know about it, so you learn to mistrust solutions. Or rather you learn that problems never stay the same. I would never impose my will upon, or threaten, a woman who told me she was going to have an abortion.
Who am I, to put myself forward as better than she is? But I would, in almost all circumstances, try very hard to persuade her out of it. The present moment she is in, however awful, will pass. This does not apply, by the way, to raped 13year-old traveller. I would be ashamed to ask her to have that baby if she doesn't want to.
The men who make the babies don't make with the same vigour a society so full of wage-earning, child-minding, mother-helping resources that the completion of all pregnancies can be contemplated. But then when a termination is decided upon, the State stands in the woman's way, and the Catholic Church attempts to heap her with shame and guilt.
There is another range of virtues, which often come into the decision to have an abortion, which come from the Creator just as surely as having a baby does - prudence, reason, knowing how to plan. You never, in this society, hear a word in praise of the sheer silent courage of the women who travel to England. Who would want to line up with the punitive hypocrites of the Irish establishment when it comes to abortion?
That's why women like me find it so hard to explain that they are sincerely anti-abortion. The problem, too, seems too big to take on. Ireland has a higher rate of abortion than the Netherlands, though abortion is freely available in the Netherlands. We should ponder that.
Is there more we can do in the way of providing contraception, and especially, the morning-after pill? How can we mitigate the sexism of this culture, so that girls and women learn to assert the value of, and exact respect for, the fruits of their sexuality? How can we move against the chaos and poverty and furtiveness which govern so many lives? How can we make there be less fear? Is it possible to envisage and even to plan for an Ireland where the first reaction to hearing a woman is pregnant would almost always be joy?
Is there any hope that we could pull off a balance, in the end, that nowhere I know of has managed? Could we treat abortion with the gravity it deserves, and at the same time make sure that it isn't used as a stick to beat women with.