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» Support for suicide abortion down: Poll - Independent.ie

The headline on this story in today’s Sunday Independent - “Support for suicide abortion down”:

“A SLIM majority (53 per cent) finds abortion acceptable in cases of a threat of suicide – down five points in three months, according to the latest Sunday Independent/ Millward Brown opinion poll.”

There are at least two issues with this that I can see (although the main overarching one is that the Irish media is not very good at transparent analysis of multiple polls over time).

The first is that, according to the RTÉ report on the same poll, a further 16% seemingly supported abortion in case of a threat of suicide in certain circumstances - which would be a total of 69% support in either some or all circumstances, with 23% opposed and 8% don’t know. That is much more in line with previous polls on the suicide question, which don’t appear to have split the question (or at least haven’t reported it if they have). After all, it’s not clear what the other circumstances are surrounding the threat of suicide, an extremely particular circumstance in itself - and how such circumstances would affect the X Case judgement itself.

The second is that the (unnamed) poll being compared to doesn’t add up on either set of figures: despite saying that “the noticeable fall since February in support for abortion where there is a threat of suicide will be of concern to the Government”, the only poll I can find in that month was the Irish Times/MRBI poll which gave 71% support for abortion in case of suicide, either an 18-point drop or (if one compares the I believe more accurate 69% figure) a 2-point one. To further strengthen the comparability of the some-or-all circumstances figure, the combination of those opposed (11%) and no opinion (18%) - 29% altogether - in February’s poll is very close to the remainder of 31% in the current poll. But regardless of which figure is used, there is no five point drop. The closest to that is a January Sunday Times/Behaviour & Attitudes poll which found 59% support for the suicide option, although in the same month a RedC poll found 64% (presumably within the same margin of error, but not five points from 53% - indeed, between two polls with typical margins of error of +/-3%, a five point drop is not statistically significant).

If there really were only 53% support in total for abortion in the case of threat of suicide, that would be an even more dramatic drop of 6, 11, 18 or even 32 points over recent polls (the last according to the X Case question in RedC’s December poll, a month after the Savita case became public - but there are particular difficulties with using that poll as comparator, which I will discuss below). However, it seems to be to be an artificially low number created by splitting the question into two different levels of support. Reintegrating it to 69%* to compare with other questions based on the X Case criteria, and making certain other alterations (detailed below) to create comparable results, this is what the last six months of polling on abortion looks like:

(‘X Case’ means any question referring to the threat to life of the woman, including the threat of suicide; ‘Excluding suicide’ is the same with the obvious exception; and ‘On request’ is of course the true pro-choice position which remains a minority but a not insignificant one, certainly much larger than the 10% who consistently oppose even the most restrictive options offered - threat to life excluding suicide.)

Of course, in five polls from four firms, differences in question framing and sampling technique will have an impact on the extent of comparability - in fact, the biggest disparity is between the two RedC polls, which used two different forms of questions as discussed below.

The X Case And Excluding Suicide

The December RedC poll attracted some criticism for the seeming incompatibility of its results and the unusual way of framing the question: it asked for people’s responses to each option together, which caused some surprise when 85% supported the X Case criteria (including suicide) while 63% supported removing the suicide grounds. As the don’t knows remained constant (5-6%), that meant an extra 20% opposed the exclusion of suicide who most likely supported the X Case criteria in full. Although the result seemed counter-intuitive in the context of the poll, given that we have had two referenda in which the option of excluding suicide was defeated by a combination of liberal and conservative voters, it is not so surprising.

The following RedC poll in January was commissioned by a different organisation and used a different form of questioning again: respondents chose just one of the four options - X Case, X Case without suicide, on request, or never. On the assumption that anyone who supported the most liberal option of abortion on request would also support the X Case criteria if it was a standalone option, I have combined the two; and likewise for the less favourable again option of excluding suicide. Although this may seem to contradict the interpretation of the December poll, I think there is a difference between seeking people’s opinion of each option simultaneously (in which case more liberal voters are opposed to an option that excludes suicide) and effectively ranking them in terms of which gets the maximum support if they were the only option.

This latter approach seems to best reflect the Behaviour & Attitudes and MRBI polls, in which threat to life excluding suicide remained the option with the broadest support - and also the most restrictive one. On this basis, and including the Millward Brown result as 69%, support for this option has been declining gradually, although there is much less change in those opposing abortion in any circumstances, suggesting that a decline in positive support is translating into don’t knows instead. (For the Behaviour & Attitudes poll, outright opposition was gleaned by subtracting the number - 92% - supportive of any one of the four options given, from 100; don’t knows were not indicated, and would in any case make the actual figure smaller.)

Other Limited Circumstances

The Behaviour & Attitudes poll lacked a question about abortion on request, although it did include an interesting figure for the number who supported each of the four options given - abortion in the case of risk to life, risk to life excluding suicide, as well as rape and fatal foetal abnormality - which was a bare majority of 51%. Since the least popular option overall, risk to life including suicide, still had 59% support it indicates that there is also still an element of non-linearity amongst the supposed liberalness of options - i.e. someone who supported suicide grounds may have opposed rape, as well as vice versa. It also indicates a difference between the proportion of the population shown in other polls to support abortion on request, on average about 30%, and the rather larger, but still barely a majority, number who support abortion in all of the (very) limited circumstances given.

More sympathetic views are evident when the trio of alternative circumstances (than risk to life) are considered individually. Across four polls there are three data points each for risk to health, rape, and fatal foetal abnormality:

For all three support is relatively constant in a band between 70-80%, although risk to health has dropped from a high in December (shortly after the Savita case) to a lower level in more recent polls. What is intriguing about the health option is that it closely tracks the X Case criteria question in each poll: 82% to 85% in the first RedC, 70% to 71% in the MRBI poll, and 69% to 69% in the latest Millward Brown (further support I feel for using the latter figure, not 53%, as the more comparable one).

This is despite the X Case criteria clearly and explicitly dealing with risk to life “as distinct from health”; but in the discourse surrounding ‘suicidal ideation’ and a suspicion that we will be following the broader UK mental health grounds for abortion by legislating for risk of life from suicide, the two seem to be converged in the public mind. In terms of ‘liberalness’, suicide and (implicitly physical) health grounds have been equated.

The Trend in Excluding or Including Suicide?

I would think therefore that the initial high support for the X Case in the December RedC poll still stands as an accurate reflection of public opinion then, and although it is not representative of more recent polling on the issue it is so consistent with the also-declining health option that is remains a valid comparison. However, the stark change in preference from it being more popular than the exclusion of suicide, to being less popular, makes the two in combination hard to credit as comparators. Since each is out by about twenty points on the later four polls, removing them changes the average - making the X Case less popular and the exclusion of suicide more popular - by around five points in each case.

One can perhaps isolate the suicide question in the December poll as contrasting so much in its mechanics from the later ones. In the first, broadly liberal respondents chose to register their opposition to a proposal seen as either undesirable, unrealistic, or both**; whereas in later polls (after the political concerns over suicide grounds had become more vocal, and after the methodology had changed to produce less ‘confusing’ results) it has registered consistent support as the most broadly acceptable option, although hardly the most preferred.

Unfortunately, apart from the December poll the figures for ‘don’t knows’ on this question haven’t been published, so one can’t discern whether the gradual decline from 90% to 78% support for this option - rather than the less obvious drop, at least from January onwards, in the X Case including suicide - is due to increased opposition from whatever quarter or, I would think more likely, increased uncertainty over the issue. Indeed, if one uses the 69% figure for support for including suicide, the two options could be seen as converging.at somewhere around the 75% mark - with everyone beyond that either wholly opposed or just unsure about the issue.

*An earlier version of the same chart with the Millward Brown figure at 53% is here

**Technically, since it represents a majority in favour of excluding suicide, if it were a question in a referendum it could alter the X Case judgement and overturn the two previous referendums; but there’s a long distance between a single poll question and a referendum result. The real question of such a referendum would be whether it would follow the trend between 1983 and 2002, where liberal and conservative constituencies remained polarised but a general social shift meant that a restrictive amendment passed in 1983 with 67% while a further one in 2002 was defeated by just 50.4%; or that of 1992 when an anomalous coalition of liberals and conservatives defeated an essentially identical restriction by 65% - could conservatives adopting a more pragmatic position today swing an exclusion by that amount? Well, it seem unlikely given the consistent majority in favour of the X Case as it stands - but the apparent shift in the polling questions.away from seeing the exclusion of suicide as an overly-restrictive option to be rejected, to an option that creates the least opposition, rather complicates such a prediction.

irish abortion politics statistics

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Under-45s hit ‘dramatically’ harder by recession, ESRI finds

The ‘jilted generation’: Ireland has spared the old but robbed the young

“The Irish are thought to be a compassionate people who care about human rights, but we are also capable of appalling selfishness towards our own citizens. A report this week from the Economic and Social Research Institute suggests that few developed nations have committed the level of intergenerational theft we have witnessed in Ireland since the financial crisis began.

The headline finding of the report, by Petra Gerlach-Kristen, is stark. “The younger age group on average spent 20 per cent less per week in 2009/2010 compared with five years earlier. Over the same period, those aged over 45 managed to keep most of their bubble-era gains, spending 31 per cent more each week than they did in 2004/2005.”

In a very short period, two groups in society have experienced a huge disparity in spending power. These groups are separated not by class or occupation or education but by the timing of their births.”

Except looking beyond the “headline finding” (or just reading it carefully), the result of this “huge disparity” is that the disposable incomes in the two age groups have converged (chart on the left, from the ESRI report). And data from the OECD up to 2009 (chart on the right) shows that Ireland has a similar distribution of income by age group to the OECD average, although 18-40 year-olds still earn somewhat more and 41-65 year-olds somewhat less, with 51-65 year olds the only age group in Ireland with a poverty rate greater than the OECD average.

This has been explained to a degree already - during the boom years Ireland did relatively well in reducing poverty in older age groups compared to a previously much worse situation, and in a way it can be said that we became a society kinder to the aged rather than one less favourable to the young. The current decline in the incomes of the young is unfortunately easy to explain - unemployment and bubble-era house prices (indeed it is only the blue line of non-housing expenditure that they are significantly worse off than the older group). The increase of the older group is more difficult to account for however, although the report itself suggests that “to a certain extent” this is “due to a rise in the average education level of older households”:

“Younger and older households earned and spent about the same sums in 2009/10. While some of this may represent a natural convergence given the rise in average education levels of the older half of the population, we argue that it is also due to young households facing credit constraints and building up savings in anticipation of these. In particular, credit constraints are likely to bind for households that are unemployed, in arrears or in negative equity. Using household budget data, we construct age profiles and show that young households are indeed more likely to be facing credit constraints than older ones.”

So the recession has impacted negatively more on younger households - that’s not in dispute. But in doing so it has only brought parity between overall incomes, not a disparity; and from a Keynesian point of view presumably it’s a good thing that some of the lost demand from younger households has been taken up by older ones (and I wonder to what extent this might include intergenerational transfers and financial support), rather the overall demand plunging even further. Additionally, compared to the OECD average income was already shifted towards the young in Ireland; and since that bloc contains a wide variety of countries, it’s useful to look at particularly equal Scandinavian ones like Denmark, Sweden, Finland or Iceland - all of which skew significantly more towards older incomes (admittedly, so does the more unequal US).

I’ve written before about the problems with the ‘intergenerational equity’ argument and how it undermines concepts of solidarity and almost explicitly rejects class-based politics (as it does here). To split society along age lines blatantly ignores that the greatest inequalities are replicated within each group; but what is particularly bad about this example is that its simplistic reading doesn’t even stand up on its own figures, were we to use the distribution of income between young and old as the main measurement of the fairness of our society.

ireland economics politics statistics

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On Self Destruction

Powerful quote from Adorno in this (itself excellent) Guardian piece about applying the Frankfurt School to the contemporary situation:

“The prospective fascist may long for the destruction of himself no less than for that of the adversaries, destruction being a substitute for his deepest and most inhibited desires … He realises that his solution is no solution, that in the long run it is doomed. Any keen observer could notice this feeling in Nazi Germany before the war broke out. Hopelessness seeks a desperate way out. Annihilation is the psychological substitute for the millennium – a day when the difference between the ego and the others, between poor and rich, between powerful and impotent, will be submerged in one great inarticulate unity. If no hope of true solidarity is held out to the masses, they may desperately stick to this negative substitute.”

I’ve always thought that the nihilism of punk (which at times drifted into Nazi imagery, if generally not unironically) was an expression of this same idea.

politics adorno hitler runoff

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Bruton redux redux

andrewtsks:

hardcorefornerds:

[…]

Paul Krugman recently provided an excellent response to that line of thinking in his New York Times column. It wasn’t aimed at Bruton, but was a general response to that line of thinking (and we have a lot of political leaders here in the USA who totally approve of it). Here’s what I find to be the most relevant passage:

if you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. So debt increases that didn’t arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.

And there’s a reason for that association: U.S. conservatives have long followed a strategy of “starving the beast,” slashing taxes so as to deprive the government of the revenue it needs to pay for popular programs.

The funny thing is that right now these same hard-line conservatives declare that we must not run deficits in times of economic crisis. Why? Because, they say, politicians won’t do the right thing and pay down the debt in good times. And who are these irresponsible politicians they’re talking about? Why, themselves.

To me, it sounds like a fiscal version of the classic definition of chutzpah — namely, killing your parents, then demanding sympathy because you’re an orphan. Here we have conservatives telling us that we must tighten our belts despite mass unemployment, because otherwise future conservatives will keep running deficits once times improve.

Krugman’s column is carried by the Irish Times on the front page of its business supplement, below the fold, so I read that ;) I thought the chutzpah bit was particularly good.

It’s quite likely Bruton saw that too - I suppose the difference is that every Irish government since the late 1980s (the last time Ireland was in a serious recession) left office with a lower debt-to-GDP ratio than it started with; including his own government between 1994 and 1997 which lowered the ratio from 88.4% to 73.4% (see). Presumably he’s aware of that, which is why he referred to spending rather than paying down debt (or its relative erosion by growth).

But I also think it’s because the idea of ‘starving the beast’ hasn’t, at least up until now, had any currency in Ireland - even on the right. Without a large military and with historic economic underdevelopment, there was no ‘beast’ until the boom years allowed Ireland to do some catching up compared to European levels of public spending, although the boom-time economics also allowed the later governments to do so while keeping the tax take (as a percentage of GDP) below the European average, closer to the US level. And we did this while running budget surpluses and reducing our debt levels, conditions Europe sees as evidence of good fiscal housekeeping.

irish politics economics american exceptionalism

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Bruton redux

The ex-Taoiseach made a bit more of a splash today on Twitter with this:

Mr Bruton said: “I am not in agreement with President Higgins because it is not realistic nor moral to say that we’re not going to face difficult issues now, but instead we’re going to avoid them by borrowing money that our children or children’s’ children will have to pay.

“That is not moral, socially just or socialist. In fact it’s immoral.

“It’s anti-social for us to avoid our responsibilities and pass them on to the next generation. Yet that’s the cry of the opponents of austerity,” he said.

It’s not really surprising that conservatives manage to make the macroeconomics of austerity to be about the family; it’s another version of making government finances about household budgets. It’s a way of fitting radical actions within a narrow worldview, and painting any alternative as contrary to natural law and individual common sense: you wouldn’t spend more than you earn, or borrow money for your children to pay off, would you? Unless you’re a sociopathic monster with no conception of the common good, of course.

But government budgets don’t work like household ones (neither do debt-laden corporate ones, it seems) and the capacity of a government to raise taxes from an entire economy means that debt is paid off from its growth. The spectre of future impoverished generations relies on absence of growth - exactly what austerity is creating, and what its opponents want to avoid. But fundamentally the image of “our children’s children’s” takes no account of inflation, of technological, social or economic progress - a true conservative vision.

It also neglects to state whose children will be suffering most from this debt burden: the privately educated with access to the most profitable careers, or the underprivileged reliant on state services being progressively dismantled by ideological austerity? Or instead will it be a more equitable world where everyone’s children will have an equal opportunity to benefit from and contribute to our economy and society? In other words, ‘children’ is not a neutral image: it is a projection of the existing social order into a future shaped by current policies.

Now that the backlash to austerity is gathering momentum in political circles, conservatives are returning to attacking the economics of the alternative. Or at least the economists. I have a certain sympathy for Niall Ferguson’s self-admittedly stupid comment on Keynes: homophobia notwithstanding, he was riffing on a particular quote, the “in the long run, we’re all dead” to point out - however callously - that while we might be dead, our descendants aren’t. Assuming we have them, however - and that is where the conservative obsession with the traditional family re-emerges.

It’s not just that it excludes homosexuals and the childless by making not only marriage but also economics (the world as a household, remember) about procreation: it also suggests that since we are concerned for our own children, we are less concerned about those of others. Or about humanity in general. Of course parental instinct is a strong and admirable force, but in our divided world is it not better that it coexist with some more communal feeling, like empathy perhaps?

It doesn’t seem as if Bruton made the same error as Ferguson, although the substantial point of his argument above is the same, when criticising Keynes:

In an unusually pointed speech to an insurance event in Dublin yesterday, Mr Bruton – who now commands a reported six-figure salary as president of the Irish Financial Services Centre – went on to vilify John Maynard Keynes, the economist seen as the father of borrowing in tough times to create economic growth.

“The assumption that you can borrow more now because in the good times you can save a bit more is wrong. In politics the last thing people will consider is cutting spending in the good times.”

The error here is assuming that Keynes meant “cutting spending” rather than saving, or increasing spending at a reasonable rate. Ironically Bruton’s time as Taoiseach is usually contrasted favourably with the later years under Bertie Ahern (and Charlie McCreevy) in that respect; even still, with all the pro-cylical tax cuts and spending increases in the boom years Ireland - in common with other bailout countries - ran budgetary surpluses and paid down significant amounts of its debt (our parents’). That didn’t help, however, when our borrowing capacity was maxed out to save the banks and, with the collapse in tax revenues based on an unsustainable property-boom economy, the government switched to equally pro-cyclical austerity measures. And the only difference since Fine Gael came into power is that the tax measures have been less progressive and the attack on state spending more ideological: so really, Bruton, fuck your morals.

irish politics

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The Bizarro Right

“Mr Bruton who now acts as an ambassador and lobbyist for the IFSC, went on to call for a more sustainable financial model, and one which had less regulation.

“We need to reign in regulation. It’s not substitute for ethics, morality or trust. It may help them but can never replace them and yet that is precisely what legislators seem to be doing. We cannot go on diverting resources, cannot afford to go on diverting the talent we use, into compliance requirements that are ever more complicated because people don’t think ethically.

“People ask themselves if a deal or selling a product is legal, is it good for their bonus/promotion and so on.

“If you want a genuinely ethical question, it needs to be ‘is it right?’ Too many corporate system to don’t ask the second questions. We need a system for ethics of what one does, and need to have essentially an examination of conscience,” he added.”

(via)

It’s striking how the right and the left are now apparently converging on criticisms of the official response to economic crisis, yet animated by very different values. Michael D. Higgins has already posed the question of how ‘ethics’ can be put back into government and business, although it seems to me that material issues, of power, are more fundamental. There’s the issue here, however, that in speaking of “ethics” and “conscience” this is the same John Bruton who has recently been advocating a hardline Catholic anti-abortion position and seeking to dismantle the legitimacy of the Supreme Court decision on suicide as a threat to life (and the failure of two referenda to alter that in the constitution). In reality he seems to be seeking a world driven by the Catholic ethics of corporatism - in which freedom is sharply defined by place in the social order - rather than a more liberal one with appropriate state regulation that those on the (moderate) left would like to see. The failure of economic liberalism does not mean that social liberalism is at fault, or that it should be replaced by traditionalist ‘ethics’ that would do little to challenge or alter the existing divisions of society (nor indeed is that its intent, as distinct from radical humanist ethics). This is not neoliberal - it is post-liberal: now that the material advantages of neoliberalism have been embedded into the social system, conservatives seek to blame its downsides on the general liberalism they see in society, trying to cut the left off from its moderate gains in terms of social freedom while maintaining the fundamental structures of society as sacrosanct (or indeed, as ‘under attack’ - when that should properly apply to employment and welfare standards under neoliberalism).

irish politics

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The falling Eurobarometer

following on from an earlier post about EU polling:

“It has been pointed out in recent weeks that faith in the EU has been declining, which is true enough. But what has not been said is that faith in government generally is on a downward slide. Eurobarometer polls show not only that the number of people who trust the EU institutions has fallen (from 57% in 2007 to 33% in 2012), but also reveal that levels of trust in national government institutions are down over the same period, from 41% to 27%.

And if we think things are bad in Europe, spare a thought for the worries of Americans. They may continue to argue that the US is the pinnacle of democracy and capitalism, and some – like George W Bush at the recent opening of his presidential library – cling to the notion that its best days are still ahead. But at few times in US history has the future looked so bleak for so many of its citizens. Since 2008, the number who believe that their country is on the wrong track has ranged between 60% and 80% of the population.”

Before we blame the EU for all our woes, is there anyone doing any better? | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The latest Eurobarometer summary (from 2012) makes for interesting reading, although there’s nothing in I can see that’s equivalent to “is your country on the wrong track” (the closest I think is “the worst is yet to come” with the jobs crisis, at 62% - the existential question of right or wrong track is more difficult to apply across Europe as a whole, and probably relies on the American assumption that they are destined to go somewhere; instead the Eurobarometer has functional questions about further economic or political integration). The lower levels of trust in national governments and parliaments than in the EU are stark, although what appears to have happened is that reduced trust in the EU has brought them somewhat closer together.

What’s most interesting, however, is I think the country-by-country breakdown of chief concerns, as outlined below:

“Concerns about economic issues continue to outweigh social and other issues in European public opinion: in every EU Member State, the first item of concern is directly related to the economy. Unemployment is the most frequently mentioned concern in 18 Member States, with particularly high scores in Spain (78%), Cyprus (73%), and Ireland, Poland and Sweden (all 65%). Since the Standard Eurobarometer survey of spring 2012, it has become the main concern in Belgium and in Greece. The economic situation is the first item mentioned in four Member States: Slovenia (60%), the Netherlands (55%), Romania (48%) and the Czech Republic (37%), and this issue also figures prominently in Cyprus (65%) and Denmark (58%). Rising prices are the main concern in Estonia (58%), Lithuania (43%), Malta (39%) and Austria (36%), but are also of serious concern in Poland (40%). As in the spring 2012 survey, Germany is the only Member State where government debt is the main worry for respondents (34%). “

Although, in line with what I was saying before about trust in the EU dropping most both in Germany and Spain, government debt is also in the top 3 concerns in countries who either have been bailed out or close to it, namely Ireland, Greece, Spain, Malta and Slovenia, as well as heavily indebted Belgium. Germany’s list of chief concerns, while not dissimilar, are the reverse of Europe’s overall: debt, inflation, economic situation/unemployment, instead of unemployment, economic situation, and inflation. It’s also interesting to see the characteristic outliers: immigration in the UK, taxation in Italy, health and social security in Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands - and apparently crime in Denmark (gotta be a reason for all those TV thrillers).

europe politics

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thewoodquarter:

Despite there being no real class system in the Republic, have some Middle-class Irish Problems

(Via)

What’s a “real class system” when it’s at home? A more codified set of snootiness like in the UK, or an even more economically unequal society like the US? I think Irish class prejudice is pretty real, even if it tends to be limited in its conscious expression to geographical distinctions (Northside/Southside, D4/everywhere else).

I like the way the above gets at the resentment and fear of people who have generally much less money than the middle class, but still have the nerve to appear to enjoy life and have their own cultural and social norms. The other examples are more straightforwardly along the lines of ‘Stuff Middle Class Irish People Like’ (Lisa Hannigan? Superquinn sausages?!) and thus fall into the problems associated with that trope.

A real middle-class Irish problem I’ve recently heard of: “they’re giving the [NAMA-fied] apartments at the end of our road to social housing, when our grown-up children have gone off and bought houses that are now in negative equity”. Urrghh.

irish politics

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Differing definitions of the “common” good, from the Archbishop of Armagh and the Independent website. As if the former wasn’t anachronistic enough…

(actually, I think this is the most sensible thing Cardinal Brady has said. The Catholic Church, at least in its institutional form, has a radically different idea of the common good from the political and social mainstream which accepts abortion in at least some circumstances. If they think they can re-input their definition in place of legislation specifically designed to fit within the constitutional framework of their own original pro-life amendment, after twice failing to restrict it further by referendum, well they should go ahead and try. The real battle over the common good will be whether the beliefs of some regarding the sanctity - let’s use that word, because this seems to be far more about theology than a rational understanding of human rights - of unborn life can continue to override the practical and social reality of many people’s wishes to make, and to allow others to make, their own choices in matters of physical and mental health - something this legislation emphatically does not do, at least not within Ireland.)

irish abortion politics

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