The Portuguese Abortion Law could be a way forward for Ireland

I liked the Portuguese abortion law - when last I looked. The good ingredient was time, lacking in our pending masterpiece of legalese. From memory, it permitted abortion up to ten weeks (although doctors could refuse to preform one, and fathers had a right to be "consulted"), and, beyond that, in a range of certain conditions, all with CLEARLY DEFINED time limits. 

It is certainly preferable to what will soon be my homeland's stance, which is it is constitutionally banned, with one condition (threat to the mother's life), but - and here is what terrible government looks like - suicide risk is considered a threat to the mother's life, so a country with a conservatively "pro-life" constitution could potentially have a relatively liberal abortion regime. 

Moreover, now, because of Ireland's cognitive dissonance, there could be more late abortions in this country, a country with a constitutional prohibition, than a country with a liberal constitutional stance, but one with clearly defined time limits. True, discriminating between in utero "trimesters" can be arbitrary, but arbitrary lines are preferable to chaos. Besides, are these distinctions arbitrary, could we possibly have a true philosophical debate about abortion in Ireland, rather than this media manufactured culture war, or, as a friend put it, "a political football to be kicked about four weeks before an election". The nihilism of the Irish far-left is deeply shocking - what is it about family, long-term commitment, motherhood, fatherhood, and, particularly, femininity, that infuriates and repulses them - but, to hell with them, what we need now is intelligence and deep, detailed debate.