Repealing the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution will constitute consent for Ireland to have a “liberal abortion regime”, the Save the 8th campaign has said.
Speaking on The Irish Times’s Inside Politics podcast, the campaign’s communications director, John McGuirk, said many people were unaware of the implications of a vote for repeal. Most voters believed they were supporting legislation allowing for abortions in cases of rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormalities, not terminations of “healthy babies of healthy mothers up to 12 weeks and beyond”, he claimed. The legislation outlined by the Government would allow unrestricted abortion for the first three months of pregnancy, and abortion on vague ‘mental health’ grounds up to the sixth month of pregnancy. That mental health ground accounts for 98% of the abortions carried out in the UK where there is one abortion for every four live births.