So . . . oh no! was my first thought, when the news broke of 'Miss D' and her foetus that can never become a baby. Oh no, not abortion again!

And yet, there has to come a time when we can think and talk about the profound civic questions raised by abortion. Because cases like the X and C and D ones will keep presenting themselves. There are far too many sperm seeking far too many eggs in far too many complicated life-stories for it not to happen . . . over and over . . . and it will seem to some pregnant woman that it is better not to complete the pregnancy and it will seem to someone else that she should and must.

If I saw the slightest chance that any other political party would take on the difficult but civic-minded task of legislating in accordance with the judicial decisions on abortion which we're trying to juggle with now, I'd vote for that party. Because one thing we know for sure . . . Fianna Fail have been here all the time and they haven't done anything.

And we're dependant on the politicians. It suits them to pretend that the hard questions don't exist. But they're in the hot seat on abortion . . . or, they should be. They're the branch of government we can influence through our votes. We can express our wishes through them . . . in theory, at any rate. And they're supposed to know us and to be willing to frame legislation in accordance with their sense of what the Irish people, on the whole, want.

Judges cannot but be remote from common experience and paternalistic in manner . . . and that's particularly galling on the profoundly intimate subject of abortion. Last week I was a visitor to the Supreme Court in Washington and I felt great coldness towards the men on the bench who, a week before, had given anti-abortion forces a victory when they ruled against the method of abortion called by anti-abortion activists the 'partial-birth' procedure. I was thrilled even to be in the Supreme Court building . . . a place where "the Republic endures and this is the symbol of its faith" . . .

and I think the distribution of power between the various arms of government in the United States was and is one of the great achievements of human thinking. But I sat there glaring uselessly at the five justices who formed the majority in the anti-abortion decision.

It's bad enough that men, and men only, made the decision about an experience that is absolutely gender-specific. But worse are the value-judgments, put forward as reasoning, which reveal a worldview entirely formed by the experience of being male, and male of a certain 'superior' kind. Justice Anthony Kennedy, for example, suggested that a pregnant woman who chooses abortion "falls away from true womanhood". Somewhere else the ruling says, "Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision, which some women come to regret" . . . and this was put forward as a reason to ban late abortion.

Some women do of course bitterly regret their abortions. But why treat women as if they were children who have to be protected against their own regret? If it were really, fully accepted that women are moral beings, just as men are, their own regret would not be used to prevent them making their own decisions, much less used against all the other moral women who do not at all regret having an abortion. "It is 'beyond Alice in Wonderland, " wrote a professor from Yale Law School, "to criminalize abortion to protect women."

This Republican . . . Bush . . . Supreme Court seems to me to have a view of women which is very much out of date and, of course, a court can be like that. But when the politicians here in Ireland grasp the abortion nettle . . . and some day they'll have to . . . we can hope they'll have a better sense of how people are . . . how they are now. Because people in the new Ireland . . . especially, perhaps, women . . . are very different from what they were in 1992 (the X case) or 1983 (the anti-abortion amendment to the constitution campaign). People have changed under the influence of money and education and hope and information streaming in through travel and through new channels of communication. It is surely far less clear to anti-abortion people than it used to be that it is the wish of a loving God that Miss D should carry her foetus to certain death. And it is increasingly less acceptable that in a multicultural Ireland, with all-island cultural aspirations, the views of the followers of one church should be priveleged over other views.

So, on second thoughts . . . no, I'm not complaining that abortion is back again. On the contrary . . . bring it on!