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DUBLIN, September 14, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Ireland’s Taoiseach — or Prime Minister — Enda Kenny has served notice he is open to the pressure from pro-abortionists and their offshore supporters to amending the nation’s constitutional protection for the unborn.

Kenny’s government already loosened the country’s pro-life law in 2013, allowing abortions through all nine months of pregnancy if the mother’s life is deemed at risk, including if the mother threatens suicide.

But asked at a Fine Gael Party retreat last week if he were returned to office in the upcoming general election whether he would hold a referendum on abortion, Kenny responded coyly, “In respect of the Eighth Amendment I do not favour abortion on demand and I have no intention of abolishing the Eighth Amendment without considering what it might be that might replace it and that means more than any other sensitive issue I am quite prepared to listen to people who have contributions to make in that regard. … But believe me, believe me, to commit to abolishing the Eighth Amendment without consideration of what you might do is not on my radar.”

Or yes, at least as far as many pro-lifers interpret him.

“Prolife voters need to be very discerning in the next election,” warned Cora Sherlock, deputy-chair of the Dublin-based Pro Life Campaign. “The Eighth Amendment is the last protection left to the unborn child. This is the same prime minister who told us during the last election he was pro-life and then his government made a law allowing abortions up to nine months of the pregnancy if the mother was suicidal.”

Since June, Ireland’s abortion restrictions have been targeted by Amnesty International, which claims its remaining law is a violation of women’s human rights. “But there is no right to abortion recognized by international law,” said Sherlock. Nonetheless, local pro-abortion groups advance the same argument with the full support of the media.

“No one wants to hear about the media being biased,” she told LifeSiteNews, “but they don’t give our side a fair hearing.” Those advocating abortion get stories published of women harrowed by their pregnancies, “but the public never hear about women who had severe complications following their abortions. They never hear the people I hear, who say, ‘I wouldn’t be alive if it hadn’t been for the Eighth Amendment.’ I’ve had mothers tell me how grateful they are that because they couldn’t get an abortion in Ireland they had to plan for a trip elsewhere to have it. But while they were planning it they changed their mind and now are so happy they had the child.”

A referendum added the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution in 1983. It guaranteed equal protection to the lives of the mother and child, which at a practical level, said Sherlock, required doctors to treat both as patients, but to allow the unborn child to die in the very rare case this was required to save the mother’s life. This interpretation was codified in Kenny’s 2013 Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act.

While two subsequent referendums failed to dislodge the Amendment, polling since then indicates growing support for abortion restrictions to be weakened by allowing it when rape or incest caused the pregnancy, or when the mother’s health is at risk. A poll last year by the Sunday Independent showed 56 percent in favour of a referendum though only a third want abortion-on-demand.

“The Irish are pro-life,” said Sherlock, but she admitted abortion is not the most important issue on the voters’ mind going into an election that is expected sometime between December and March.

The Labour Party, now running third in the polls behind Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, has promised a referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment if elected. “One thing is sure,” said Sherlock. “Tens of thousands of people wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for the Eighth Amendment.”

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