Back in 1983, at the time of the first Right to Life Referendum campaign, one of the left groupings came out with a pamphlet by someone who is now a middle-ranking academic in an Irish university. In the pamphlet she wrote of a woman’s right to an abortion up to (and I am relying on memory here, because it would take too much time rooting through files to find the original) ‘the last hour of the last day of the last month’ of the pregnancy.

A rather extreme view, one might think, reading it at first glance. But then, on reflection, not at all so.

Liberalism and its militant feminist element raise the biggest hue and cry over the most controversial cases. This is understandable—but it is purely a propaganada device. For individual cases, whether they be controversial or uncontroversial, have no role to play in the abortion argument as it is put forward.

A woman’s right to abortion, a woman’s ‘right to choose,’ is precisely that—a right. Or so the liberals would have it. And being a right it requires no justification. If, for whatever reason, a woman wishes to have an abortion, under the liberal prescription she has no need to make a case for it. It is purely a matter of individual choice. As possessor of a right, she is entitled to indulge that right as she sees fit—irrespective of whether, in the case of abortion, it be in the first month or last month of the pregnancy, or for cosmetic reasons, or reasons of maybe a more serious nature.

Now a right, on the liberal agenda, consists in general of something you pull out of the air, not because it is true, but because you want it to be true. The thing then is to propagandize it and sloganize it until it becomes embedded in the popular consciousness simply as a result of repetition. The ‘woman’s right to choose’ is a case in point.

Usually there is little by way of argument involved in the process. But the ‘woman’s right to choose,’ simply because it runs counter to at least two thousand years of thinking differently—for instance, Elaine Pagels, the feminist biblical scholar, speaks of ‘the everyday crimes of pagan culture’ as categorised in the Didache, one of the earliest Christian texts, predating at least some of the Gospels: ‘“You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not have sexual intercourse with boys . . . you shall not practice magic; you shall not murder the child in the womb, nor kill newborns . . . you shall not turn away the destitute”’ (Beyond Belief, The Secret Gospel of Thomas: Elaine Pagels: Pan Macmillan, 2005)—it is for this very reason, the liberal case for abortion, faced with the longstanding Christian antipathy to the practice, was forced to produce at least some justification for its position.

This consists simply in the assertion, assisted by a trawl through history for anything that might back up the contention, that the child in the womb is not a human being until the moment it is born. This is another of those assertions that is true simply because the liberals and feminists want it to be true. It leads to a surreal Tommy Cooper type of situation. On the one hand, we have the infant in the womb, at the point of birth—but according to the feminists it is not really an infant, but rather a thing, a foetus, a—in the words of a feminist speaker at a meeting in Cassidy’s in Park Street back in the early 1980s—zygote; and thus amenable to being disposed of.

On the other hand, a few moments later the infant is born, and—‘just like that!’—it is suddenly a child, and subject to the full rights of a human being, including the right to life, not to mention the full panoply of feminist ooh-ings and aah-ings that often accompany such events.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a sort of schizophrenia—to use the word in its everyday sense as a synonym for split-personality—at the root of the whole liberal and feminist position on abortion—a position that is hard to square with the often over-the-top concern with children’s rights and children’s interests that is another stated mainstay of the liberal agenda.

On a certain level, of course, both positions are held cynically, as political devices aimed at furthering the interests of the women’s movement—or whatever it is that underlies the women’s movement. But at another level, where the ‘argument’ shades off into the hysterical, one can sometimes sense the operation of something different—conscience, perhaps.

Faced with the dichotomy that lies at the heart of their position, many feminists go simply into denial mode. Animated by a repressed sense of guilt over abortion, their instinctive reaction is to exaggerate the maternal and caring sides of their natures by way of unconscious compensation. But that is another day’s argument . . .

One commentator, at least, has set herself the task of cutting through the whole web of prevarication that has clouded the issue. Writing in 2008, Camille Paglia, the prominent and controversial American feminist, goes on to say:

‘Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice . . . [However] I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue.’

To put it another way: ‘Abortion is murder, Sisters. A necessary murder—but still murder.’ A chilling statement, no doubt—yet one that penetrates to the heart of the debate with all the sudden clarity of the sun through the portal of Newgrange on a cloudless 21st of December.