Sorry, I've been a bit poorly (Ok again now), and this is one of the several threads that I kicked out of my sickbed for a few days.

"As I've said, I think that ideally this is one issue where it would be better if the decision rested with women, rather than with the electorate as a whole..."

I even have a massive problem with this. Arbitrarily excluding half the population from a referendum is highly contentious. There are very many men, fathers, family men, siblings and the like who have far more direct involvement, physical and emotional as well as via providing financial and other security, with the wellbeing of the women they love and the children those women bear than many women ever experience in their own lives. There are many women such as nuns and other celibates, women in same-sex relationships and so on, who have never had those same ties that might lead to their looking after their own children. I've been very close to three tragedies in my personal life that touch on both spontaneous late abortion and elective abortion, so I know a thing or two. Tell me that rules me out of being "objective" and I might just have to tell you where to go. Yet in Ireland you'd deprive me of a vote, whereas lifetime nuns, elderly women decades past their childbearing years who have lived through an era of drastic change and never-married women would all get their say? Wow.   


By the way, this afternoon I had to use a needle to get a splinter out of my thumb, and there was a drop of blood. Every one of those blood cells was just as much alive as the rest of me.