From what I have read, what seems to make Ireland a pro-life country is the legal view that a child’s life is equivalent to a mother’s from the point of conception.  This leads to a whole different way of treating difficult pre-natal situations from a country where the legal position is that the child is not a child but something less than human (often called a foetus) until some arbitrary stage in the pregnancy.

Well I am not a lawyer but that is how it reads to me.

If that is the case then I am all in favour of it staying that way.

Again from what I have heard and read however that doesn’t mean there won’t be some difficult legal situations that will arise.  When you have an adult or even a child threatening the life of another person it is difficult but the courts can deal with it and there are precedents.  A child would normally be considered as having diminished responsibilities as compared with an adult.  However a child in the womb can  have no responsibility at all for threatening the life of the mother and that is very difficult to legislate for.  So we seem to have buried our heads in the sand about this for some time now. Yes it is a difficult issue and perhaps the only way to deal with it is to have a judge nearby who can rule in each case as to what the best thing to do is.  In our pro-life environment we can be sure that any judgement made by doctors or specially assigned judges will be those that try to preserve the lives of both.  But unfortunately there are cases arising in this State in which that horrible decision has to be made.  They may be very few but they do arise.

The current approach is to avoid the situation or pass it over to another jurisdiction to deal with it.  I don’t believe that is the right approach.