An American Professor of Law has strongly challenged the argument by pro-choice lawyers that the Oireachtas could still enact protections for the unborn child and thereby restrict abortion in the event of the Eighth amendment being repealed from the Constitution. In a letter to The Irish Times, the 60 lawyers and law students claimed that despite the ruling by the US Supreme Court in Roe v Wade in 1973 , State legislatures could still “regulate abortion access” and that, as a result, “many American States now have very conservative abortion laws”.

However, in an opinion piece in today’s Irish Times, Carter Snead, professor of law and political science at the University of Notre Dame in the US, said this is simply not the case. Indeed, not only has the US Supreme Court repeatedly struck down the attempts of individual States to impose even modest restrictions on abortion law, but it has rendered the US regime among the seven most extreme in the World, along with the likes of China and North Korea, according to a recent fact-check by the Washington Post.