OPINION/Vincent Browne: The absolutist position on abortion is founded on the intuition that it is always wrong deliberately to kill innocent human life. We enshrine that moral intuition in our criminal law and are proud that our society goes to some lengths - when it does - to protect the most vulnerable members of humanity. The defenceless unborn in the womb, unable to assert their own rights, have, we feel, a special call on our consciences. The spectacle of millions of unborn human beings being ravaged in abortion clinics around the world each year strikes many of us as an abomination.
Even if we have to compromise on this strong moral intuition to the extent of the pragmatic accommodation with abortion in Britain, surely the insistence that there can be no abortions in our society is a stance, however modest, on the side of these defenceless beings?
Unfortunately there is a problem with this reasoning. It would be, in my view, unchallengeable, if what was being asserted was a simple right of the unborn to protection against being killed or injured.
But it is more than that, much more than that. It is also a demand: a demand of mothers to have their bodies used for the propagation of the unborn, irrespective of the trauma, the pain - physical or emotional - that this poses upon women.
Essentially what is at the heart of the abortion issue is not just the right of the unborn to life but the validation of that right against the mother, irrespective of what it does to the mother, irrespective of her wishes, irrespective of her circumstances, irrespective even of her consent (as arises in the case of rape).
The abortion issue is not about the slaughter of babies, as though they were lined in rows along corridors of maternity hospitals and serial killers were massacring them in their thousands.
If that were what was at stake, the issue would be unproblematic. It is not analogous to that for it is also about coercing women into giving their bodies to the sustenance of those babies for up to nine months.
Of course, the question of coercion does not enter into it in the case of the vast majority of pregnant women, most of whom are delighted and enriched by the giving of their bodies to the sustenance of their babies. But for some women this is not the case.
And what the abortion issue is about essentially is saying to those women who are traumatised, distressed or even hysterical at the thought and reality of pregnancy that if they don't give their bodies to the sustenance of this being for up to nine months they face the wrath of the criminal code - this is enshrined in Article 2 (1) of the Bill attached to the proposed Constitutional amendment ("no person shall carry out or effect an abortion in the State").
Why only in these circumstances do we require people to give of their selves so much for the survival of a human being, when we place no such obligations on, for instance, middle-class males, for the survival of millions of human beings? Isn't it manifestly obvious that if us middle-class males in the western world curtailed our lifestyles - bought less expensive cars or no cars, cut down on drink, on restaurants, on lavish presents for our children, on foreign holidays, on trophy houses - and gave all the saved resources to the poor of the world, we would save millions of lives? Yes, of course, this applies to middle-class woman as well.
But we don't do that and if the State threatened us with criminal sanctions for not giving of our selves in that relatively trivial way, there would be uproar. So why should women - for instance those who are raped and for whom the idea of bringing the child of their rapist to full term is hugely traumatic - be forced to give so much of their selves on the grounds that unless they do so another human being will die?
The rest of us are permitted to escape very similar moral obligations free of any sanctions at all, even the sanction of a moral rebuke by society.
The point is most vividly illustrated in the case of a woman who has been raped: why should she have any moral obligation to give sustenance to the unborn child that comes into being in defiance of her wishes more than the moral obligation that all of us have towards the sustenance of every other human being?
Why should unconsensual motherhood attract any moral obligation, let alone an obligation backed up by the criminal law?
Of course it is the case that in an entirely pro-choice environment some pregnant women would opt for abortions for reasons that would appear to many of us as trivial.
No, I am not saying that women opt for abortions for trivial reasons. Of course in the vast majority of cases this is a hugely difficult and distressing option, but surely it can be conceded there can be some circumstances in which abortions are resorted to for reasons that would strike the rest of us as less than compelling. I would have no difficulty in accepting that such abortions are morally unsupportable.
But how in any individual case could anyone tell that the reasons for a pregnant woman opting for an abortion were trivial? How could anyone's moral judgment be substituted for hers?
Odd, isn't it, that the only area of our criminal law where someone is required to do something - rather than prohibited from doing something - is in an area that applies solely to women?