Ireland Keeps Abortion Status Quo

By a razor-thin margin, voters rejected a government plan to tighten Ireland’s tough abortion laws, official returns showed Thursday--a victory for those pushing for greater abortion rights.

The result from Wednesday’s referendum left in legal limbo a decade-old Supreme Court judgment that sought to legalize abortions for women whose pregnancies threatened their lives, including from suicide.

The defeated amendment would have overturned this landmark 1992 ruling, which created the first exception to Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion, the toughest such law in the European Union.

The vote was a defeat for the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic bishops, who each had issued letters calling for churchgoers to vote “yes,” made no comment on the result.

Jubilant “no” campaigners said the amendment’s rejection--by 10,556 votes out of more than 1.2 million cast--meant that the next Irish government would be obliged to pass legislation allowing pregnant, suicidal women to receive abortions in Ireland.

Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said his amendment had been “an honest and genuine attempt” to resolve the constitution’s abortion ban with the Supreme Court ruling.

He vowed to press ahead with plans to form a Crisis Pregnancy Agency, which would aim to counsel many of the approximately 7,000 Irish women who travel to England each year for abortions.

The outcome reflected a profound divide in attitudes between rural and urban Ireland, particularly between the increasingly outward-looking capital and the rest of the country.

All 10 Dublin constituencies had strong “no” majorities, including Ahern’s central Dublin district, where three-fifths of voters rejected his plans. But elsewhere, most constituencies had solid “yes” majorities, led by the far northwestern county of Donegal, which habitually records the strongest vote on traditional morality issues.

Political analysts said Ahern’s referendum probably was lost because of a split within the ranks of Ireland’s many anti-abortion groups.