Originally a comment by Donal O’Keeffe on They tried to out-Catholic each other.

As the author of the original article in TheJournal.ie,http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/clinically-dead-pregnant-women-highlights-repeal-the-8th-amendment-1856170-Dec2014/, I should add that the column was written in the context of Ireland’s latest – but unlikely to be its last – “right-to-life” horror story. This time the very meaning of life and the very meaning of death were twisted and reduced to the stuff of nightmares as doctors, fearing prosecution for murder, denied a brain-dead pregnant woman a natural death.

(Dearbhail McDonald, Legal Editor of the Irish Independent, covered that story in some depth here:http://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/time-to-speak-out-on-eighth-amendment-30865496.html)

The Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution was foisted on supine politicians in 1983 and voted for by 850,000 people. The youngest of those voters are in their fifties now. The Irish Times’ Fintan O’Toole wrote recently, and brilliantly, about the forces behind the Eighth Amendment. They were exactly who you think they were. Read O’Toole’s column here:http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/why-ireland-became-the-only-country-in-the-democratic-world-to-have-a-constitutional-ban-on-abortion-1.1907610

That amendment gave us Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution, which states that mother and unborn have equal rights to life and the State will vindicate those rights where practicable. In effect, a woman, a sentient person, is reduced in value to being of the same worth under Irish law as a days-old cluster of cells within her.