Teen-Ager’s Abortion Appeal Heard : Ireland: The Supreme Court may rule this week on her wish to leave the country for the procedure.

Ireland’s Supreme Court on Monday took up the appeal of a 14-year-old pregnant girl who said she was raped by a friend’s father and who has been barred by officials from traveling to England for an abortion--an action that has rocked Ireland and shocked many observers in Europe.

The court, which will hear arguments for two days and is expected to rule later this week, rejected the Irish media’s requests to be admitted to the closed proceedings.

In their deliberations, the justices must decide the validity of a lower court decision upholding an order by Atty. Gen. Harry Whelehan forbidding the teen-ager to leave the country for an abortion.

The lower court based its decision on Ireland’s constitution, which outlaws abortion under an amendment adopted in a bitter and divisive national referendum nine years ago. Ireland does however, permit a “morning-after pill” that terminates pregnancies in the first 72 hours.

Lawyers for the girl and her family argue that forbidding the girl to travel runs counter to the constitution’s guarantee of civil liberties. It also conflicts, they contend, with the U.N. Convention on Human Rights and European Community rules allowing freedom of movement by citizens of member states.

The five-member Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Thomas Finlay, is believed to include at least three constitutional conservatives who may be disinclined to allow abortion.

But members of the new government of Prime Minister Albert Reynolds, which is paying the family’s legal fees for the appeal, have privately revealed that they hope the court will find a way to let the girl leave Ireland, thus averting a potentially wrenching new political crisis over the abortion issue.

The teen-ager has said she was molested for two years, then raped by the father of a schoolgirl friend. She reportedly has six weeks before her pregnancy endures beyond the legal limit for abortion in Britain. Only predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland among the European Community’s 12 countries unconditionally bars abortion.

In the lower court’s decision, Judge Declan Costello held that the EC convention on free travel does not apply in “moral” matters such as abortion. He said he was obliged to enforce the travel ban, although it might be “very painful, distressing and tragic for the girl and her family.”

He said that whoever had raped the girl was “depraved and evil” and noted that the teen-age victim has said she wants “to kill herself by throwing herself down the stairs.”

The girl’s plight has generated a major controversy across Europe. In Dublin over the weekend, 4,000 demonstrators--including rock star Sinead O’Connor--paraded against the lower court’s decision. Protesters on Sunday carried placards reading: “Rapists 1, Women 0,” and “Ireland Defends Men’s Rights to Procreate by Rape.”

In Ireland itself, public outcry over the case has been intensified because the man accused in the case has not been arrested, supposedly because the only evidence against him is the girl’s testimony.

Her family originally cooperated with the police. They told authorities they planned to take their daughter to London for an abortion and asked if a sample from the fetus could be used as a “genetic fingerprint” to identify the man. They were already in London for the procedure when Whelehan issued his injunction, and they returned to Dublin without the abortion being performed.

Women’s organizations in Ireland say that about 5,000 women from Ireland and Ulster travel each year to England for abortions.

In Northern Ireland, Protestant politicians, although not necessarily pro-abortion, have argued that the rigidity of the Irish constitution on such issues shows that Ulster should never be allowed to come under the domination of a Catholic government in Dublin.

In Italy and Spain, also heavily Catholic, the Irish girl’s story has been played prominently by the media. The Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera said the case is an example of the difficulties that will confront a united Europe, made up of different cultures and traditions.

Abortion on demand has been legal in Italy since 1978; Spain’s Socialist government has also legalized abortion in cases involving rape, possible defects of the fetus and threats to a woman’s life.

“The awful thing about Ireland,” said Helen Axby, director of three London abortion clinics, “is that while countries like Italy and Spain have been relaxing their abortion laws, it has all gone backward in Ireland. Not only do they not allow the operation but there is this terrible ban on information on abortion in Ireland.”

An opinion survey published by Dublin’s Sunday Independent reported that 66% of those questioned agreed that the constitution’s abortion amendment should be changed “to allow for abortion in certain . . . circumstances.”

In a widely quoted editorial, the Irish Times said that the Republic of Ireland, because of its “descent into cruelty” demonstrated by the way the teen-ager’s case has been handled, might be compared with the harsh regimes of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran.