Catholic Church calls on Irish government to hold abortion referendum

And I repeat, Gearoid, your argument is strikingly cynical. You say, in effect, to a pregnant woman who needs a life-saving abortion, "Too many other women have aborted their pregnancies for reasons that I disapprove of, so no, you may NOT have your life-saving abortion." The possibility that some may abuse a law (in your estimate) is no reason to withhold the law. And it's also completely irrelevant whether pro-choice advocates are, as you say, "morally and spiritually bankrupt"-- they have a sound argument from justice and human rights, so their personal characters would be no consideration even if they were evil beings. You close down every possibility of a pregnant woman having an "equal right to life" as the Irish Constitution requires. So we see how utterly useless that constitutional "protection" is for pregnant women. It functions only to keep "equal" doomed fetuses alive for hours or days and to allow "equal" pregnant women to die. At the basis of every argument you offer is a medieval churchman's distrust of, and belief in the moral inferiority of, women, who you will never agree should exercise free will just as men do.

Sorry about the multiplication of my comments-it seems to be an issue with the "submit" button which did not seem to work after being repeatedly pressed. It seems to be a software problem with the IC button control on this forum. Getting back to the topic at hand, the vast majority of abortions are performed on women in the US for personal reasons that do not constitute immediate threats to their health. An ingenuous argument can be used to reveal the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of those who use a woman's "right to chose" in various circumstances to opt for abortion e.g.damage to mental health, damage to family, damage to career prospects, damage to financial prospects, damage to plans for her life. If one was to use those reasons in terms of a defense case in court as good grounds for killing someone, more than likely they would be convicted and suffer the appropriate legal punishment i.e life in prison. So why should they be extend as mitigating circumstances for people who chose to abort their young. These reasons come to the fore in survey after survey in the US concerning the rationale that respondents use to opt for abortion.

Once again, Eiriamach, you distort my words. I have certainly not "misused" statistics as you disingenuously claim but rather done a great service to the truth about the real reasons behind the reasons why Irish women travel to the UK to abort their young. Clearly from information received under the FOI(Freedom of Information) no Irish women were included under category G in the British Abortion act during the extensive period 1995-2010. Category G only categorizes health issues which are an immediate danger to health Category C which you refer can be related to "social" issues, as a lot of women use the "mental health" category because they feel that the child growing inside them might be an inconvenience or could be a strain on their resources. I'm sure you have heard of the rhetorical question-"how long is a piece of string" and the boundaries of Category C are pretty elastic when it comes to reasons and they are not in themselves immediately threatening to a woman's health. Expert counselling would be a proper solution to mental health or depression issues that arise during a pregnancy.

Here are some medical facts not included in the statistics you call "social reasons": "Around one in five [pregnancies] will result in a miscarriage. Ectopic pregnancies occur in 11 per 1,000 pregnancies. Between 2006 and 2008, there were 35,495 confirmed cases of ectopic pregnancies and, of these, six women died during their first trimester as a direct result of their pregnancy.... Approximately 20% of pregnancies miscarry; this equates to roughly 168,000 miscarriages per year in England, with 143,000 of these occurring in the first trimester. In England during 2010-11, a total of 54,162 women had either a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy which resulted in an NHS hospital stay (43,005 cases of miscarriage and 11,157 cases of ectopic pregnancy)." Although at least some of the women who experience miscarriage have the assistance of vacuum aspiration or surgical abortion -- procedures that the Galway doctors withheld from Savita Halappanavar -- these cases are hospital statistics that you omit. For this reason also, "Aggregated statistics can tell us very little about the reasons why individual women have abortions, which continue to be varied and complex" (BPAS, UK).

Also, Gearoid, you misrepresent "The US average figures for abortion" as the rate of abortions in pregnancy. There was a baby boom reaching maturity as Roe v Wade came into law. At times when the absolute number of abortions increased, still the RATE of aborted pregnancies as a percentage of all pregnancies decreased. In fact through the 1970s, although the decrease was erratic, the abortion rate was declining, and as govt and Guttmacher records show, it has declined steadily since 1980. It's a misrepresentation, and a misuse of statistics, to claim otherwise. With legalization of abortion in the USA, along with access to contraception and sex education, the RATE of abortions has decreased.

You misuse statistics, Gearoid. PBAS web site explains, "In general, the national statistics do not, and cannot, reflect the real reasons why abortions are considered necessary. They can only reflect the grounds that are cited to make them lawful." PBAS also states, "The vast majority (98%, in 2011) of all abortions take place under Ground C: ‘the pregnancy has not exceeded its 24th week and the continuation of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman’." Anti-abortion activists routinely misrepresent Ground C as "social reasons." This is a falsification. It's a category set up to supply statistics about health and does not record motives for seeking abortion. PBAS points out, "Ground C is often referred to as ‘the mental health clause’, and is perceived as the way in which doctors certify abortion ‘on request’, or ‘social abortions.’" Because of way statistics are gathered, doctors often recommend checking "Ground C" even when symptoms are present that indicate significant physical threats to life or severe or lethal fetal anomalies, so as the agency says, these statistics tell us nothing about reasons.

In today's Daily Mail: Mother who decided not to abort disabled baby after seeing his smile in a 3D scan tells how she cuddled him with joy for his precious few hours of life

The US average figures for abortion over the last 30 years have hardly varied that much i.e around 1.2-1.3 million as reported by the Guttmacher Institute(a non-governmental pro-abort agency). This organization is hardly a neutral source but is used in place of unreliable figures from governmental agencies. There have been spikes as in 2009 but the numbers given do not vary too much. But over a million abortions a year can hardly be all "medical" emergencies and more often than not the victims of this terrible procedure are the young pregnant mums and their babies in the Latino and African-American communities due to so-called "unplanned" pregnancies. Surely the US Healthcare sector has something better to offer those young mums than abortion clinics run by such insiduous organizations as Planned Parenthood.

How can my views be "warped", Eiriamach in view of the reality that not a single recorded abortion carried out on an Irish woman who traveled to the UK between 1992-2010 for that particular purpose, was done for any health threat to her life. This information was revealed after a healthcare group, namely the Committee for Excellence in Maternal Healthcare (CEMH) gut in a request under the FOI(Freedom of Information Act) to the British Dept of Health to reveal the reasons why Irish women expressly went to the UK to have their fetuses/embryos aborted. In other words, not a single woman gave reasons which could be placed under Section G of the Abortion Act, which requires records to be kept of abortions conducted to “prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman”. So this information puts the kibosh on the misleading claims of the pro-abort lobby that Irish women travel to Britain to have abortions because the child in the womb presents a impending health danger. The majority of abortions happen because the child is unplanned or will become a nuisance in terms of interfering with one's social life.

More relevant facts: Hansen notes on page 385: "Abortion rates are higher, not lower, the larger the proportion of Catholics in a state; and the strength of this reversed relationship has increased over time." And, with a chart spanning 1973-2000, FactCheck. org clarifies the relationship between access to abortion and women's suicides. FactCheck refutes Rick Santorum's claim that suicides by "desperate women" have worsened since 1973 (with his false conclusion that abortion increases suicide rates): "Actually, the suicide rate for women has dropped by one-third since Roe was decided. According to the Center for Disease Control, the rate was 6.5 per every 100,000 women in 1973, and had fallen to 4.06 by 2001, the most recent year on record." Age-adjusted rates show even more dramatically "a decline of 41 per cent, compared to a decline of 34 per cent for the unadjusted rate. Either way, Santorum was way off." Access to abortion lowers the death rate for both women and infants; it does not lead to more women seeking abortion or to a decrease in births; it has benefited the health of both women and their families.

I'm not "plain wrong," Gearoid: Susan B. Hansen reported in "State Implementation of Supreme Court Decisions: Abortion Rates Since Roe v Wade," 1980 (online): "One dramatic result of the legalization of abortion has been a decrease in abortion-related maternal deaths," which "declined from 39 in 1972 to 19 in 1973, 5 in 1974, and 3 in 1975. The abortion death rate fell from 5.7 per million women of reproductive age between 1963 and 1973, to 0.5 ... in 1976. Abortion is now far safer than tonsillectomy or normal childbirth.... Despite the concerns of anti-abortion groups, abortion rates and illegitimacy have not shown an appreciable increase since 1973(pp 378-9). WashingtonPost's "The state of Roe v. Wade in 9 charts," 2/12: "Abortion rates climbed after the [Roe v Wade] decision, a trend that had started in the late 1960s, as states began liberalizing their abortion laws. Abortion rates have now been declining since the 1980s" with decline in the number of abortion providers following. The WP warns, "Guttmacher Institute .... found that countries with more liberal abortion laws tend to have lower rates of abortion -- perhaps due to factors like greater access to contraception. That research ... also found countries with more abortion restrictions to have higher rates of abortion-related deaths."

@Gear0id, You condemn women on nothing but a warped view that women's motives are self-serving: that "the vast majority" of Irish women who travel to the UK for abortions "undergo this horrible procedure for 'social' reasons." This view leads you to deny the right to life of women in medical crisis whose deaths doom the fetus as well. In consequence, you cannot answer my question: "How large does the number of women who die from complications of pregnancy have to be before you consider their deaths a reason for allowing doctors to abort their pregnancies to save their lives?" When a distorted view of female human nature leads to such despotism, it becomes clear that its driving force is not morality, not love of God, not Christian commitment, but a deep distrust and fear of women.

A test.

@Eiriamach, What are you suggesting in regards to the mortality figures which are at present low for Ireland in relation to maternity? Are you suggesting abortion at all costs? In relation to Irish women who travel to the UK for abortions, the vast majority undergo this horrible procedure for "social" reasons and not because of any medical emergencies. Your take on the abortion figures in the US since the inception of the Roe v Roe decision is plain wrong. Accepted estimates for the total number of abortions in the US since that fateful decision, is in the 40-50 million range which is a catastrophe by any measurement and is tantamount to abortion on demand. Your point about contraceptives does not hold water, as some surveys of abortion clinics show that at least half of abortions are carried out for contraceptive failure in the US.

Will Hamilton -what a source of intelligent comment !!! Can you imagine trying to educate that bigot !