This was originally posted on my old blog on 26 July 2013.

Recently, it came to light that an Irish citizen discovered she was pregnant again, and, suffering from fibroids and with a history of difficult pregnancy, she decided she wanted an abortion. Ireland, however, doesn’t allow abortion unless your life is in danger if the pregnancy continues. Therefore, the family had to scrape and save before they could afford for her to travel to the UK, like 4000 other Irish women did, to have the procedure carried out. This resulted in the abortion taking place later in the pregnancy, at 19/20 weeks. The longer you leave it, the greater the chance of complications. Hours after the abortion, the woman was travelling to the home of a relative in a taxi, when she suffered massive internal bleeding, had a heart attack, and died.

The Irish Minister for Children, Frances Fitzgerald, was “extremely shocked”.

I’ll take a moment to let that sink in. An adult, who is a government minister and therefore presumably not unintelligent, is shocked that when you force women through restrictive laws to travel to another country if they don’t want to be forced incubators, you greatly increase their risks and in some cases cause death.

Here is the bottom line: the legalisation of abortion is not about supporting or opposing abortion itself. It is about depriving everyone of their right to decide how they feel about the issue or letting people decide for themselves. Some people feel humanity begins at conception, others would say when there’s a heartbeat, others will say a fetus becomes a human being with rights equal to all others’ when they can live separate from the body of the mother. There is no clear cut answer, therefore there should be no clear cut law. Each person must be allowed to make their own choice.