Rape is rape and abortion is abortion. Except when they’re not. – Spectator Blogs

Way back in my debating days at Trinity College, Dublin we knew you could guarantee large crowds and impressively  – that is, pleasingly – bad-tempered debates twice a year. These were the annual debates on Northern Ireland and abortion. And they really were annual fixtures during which, for years on end, the same arguments were deployed with the same passion and no-one’s views were ever changed by anything they heard.

In those days it was usually pretty clear who the bad guys were too. In the case of abortion it was anyone speaking as a representative of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child or, more generally, anyone whose views seemed dictated by the Roman Catholic Church. These were the people standing in the way of Ireland’s journey to modernity. They were the extremists.

The X-Case – in which the Irish government attempted to prevent a young rape victim from traveling to England to abort her pregnancy – was still a raw, painful memory.