Following the enactment of the 1979 Family Planning Act, conservative groups sought to reassert Ireland’s traditional morality by demanding an amendment to the Irish Constitution guaranteeing the right to life of the ‘unborn’. The Supreme Court had cited similar arguments to Roe v. Wade in the McGee case, and it was alleged that similar arguments might result abortion being legalised in Ireland. The amendment was passed in September 1983. Following the 1967 British Abortion Act, a growing number of Irish women were travelling to Britain for abortions and this abortion trail grew in the 1980s and 1990s, despite restrictions on abortion referrals. In 1991 the Supreme Court ruled in the X case that abortion was legal in order to save a woman’s life. Three referenda held in 1992 affirmed the right to information about abortion and the right to travel for an abortion and rejected a proposal to reverse the Supreme Court judgement. This referendum was again rejected in 2002. The Pro-Life Amendment hindered the treatment of pregnant women and was a factor in the death of Savita Hallapanuvar in 2012.

In the nineteenth century abortion was widely available in Britain but abortionists risked life imprisonment. In 1927 The Lancet suggested that doctors should be allowed to act in good faith and in 1929 abortion to save a woman’s life became legal. Calls for change grew and the Abortion Law Reform Association was formed in 1936. In 1937 an investigation found that abortion caused 14% of all puerperal deaths. In 1938 a leading gynaecologist, Aleck Bourne, was acquitted after performing an abortion on a 14-year-old rape victim. In 1939 a committee recommended that grounds should include serious risk to health. War changed Parliament’s priorities and in 1952-4 abortion was the third commonest cause of maternal death: 80% of the women were married with children. Abortion was the leading cause in the 1960s, and, in 1967, after many failed attempts, Parliament passed the Abortion Act sponsored by David Steel, a young Liberal MP. The number of legal abortions rose to equal pre-1967 estimates and levelled off. By 1979 deaths from abortion – including those classed as spontaneous – had almost disappeared. Medical opinion was still split and NHS provision remained patchy for years.