TDs have been taken to task for refusing to mandate pain-relief for babies suffering late-term abortions. Writing in the Irish Times, Rev Dr Chris Hayden, a priest of the diocese of Ferns and editor of Intercom magazine, said a vet putting down a horse will do all in his or her power to ensure that the animal is comfortable, unstressed and pain-free. What then, he asked, “might be the problem with extending the same ‘humaneness’ to an unborn human?”

Dr Hayden said that nobody is arguing that the unborn is not sentient, or that dismemberment or poisoning do not cause it agony, so it begs the question: why not make pain-relief mandatory, in law?

The answer, he writes, “is as simple as it is sinister.”

“Give any recognition, anywhere in the legal apparatus, of the sentient nature of the unborn, and you open a door towards a recognition of humanity. Open that door, and you might open another – and another. We can’t deny the reality of an unborn creature writhing in agony inside its human mother while the abortionist’s tools take hold. This has been recorded on ultrasound. We can’t deny it, but we must not recognise it either. It is an inconvenient truth.”