IRELAND is heading towards what may well be a historic moment, with its 25 May referendum on whether to relax the country’s near total ban on abortion.

Voters are being asked if they want to repeal a constitutional clause – the Eighth Amendment – voted into law by a referendum in 1983. It makes having an abortion, other than when the woman’s life is at risk, a crime punishable by up to 14 years in jail.

It is one of the world’s most prohibitive such laws, and women who are made pregnant by rape or incest, or …