Ireland’s highly restrictive abortion laws have come under renewed focus after it emerged that doctors in an Irish hospital are seeking legal advice over whether they can switch off the life support machine of a brain-dead woman who is 16 weeks pregnant.

The family of the woman want the medical team there to allow her to die. The woman, who is understood to be in her mid to late twenties, suffered head trauma and a clot to the brain.

But even though there is no chance of revival, doctors at the hospital are reluctant to carry out her family’s wishes because she is 16 weeks pregnant.

Under the 8th amendment to the Irish Republic’s constitution the foetus inside her is as much an Irish citizen as the clinically dead mother.


In 1983 a coalition of conservative Catholic pressure groups sought and won a national referendum that effectively made even the embryo after conception an Irish citizen fully protected under the law.