Nope. We all know that this is a misstatement of fact, because in reality the 8th Amendment has actually saved an estimated 100,000 lives in Ireland.
To support this view, the Pro-Life Campaign in September 2016 commissioned an independent actuarial report to show how many lives have been saved by that amendment; that number has been conservatively estimated at 100,000.
In the Pro-Life Campaign’s analysis on how many lives the 8th Amendment has saved many variables were considered, which is why they offer 100,000 lives saved by the 8th Amendment as a lower estimate to what it truly is.1
Abortion campaigners in Ireland make the extraordinary claim that the 8th Amendment has not saved a single life and has had no effect other than to ensure that Irish abortions happened abroad. The repeal movement want the public to believe in the fiction that the law does not influence our behaviour or that somehow the 8th Amendment is different to every other law ever passed and has had no impact on those it was introduced to protect. The truth is repeal of the 8th Amendment would inevitably result in more lives being lost. That’s the tragic reality of legalised abortion. 2
Check out the Actuarial Report here to see how the Pro-Life Campaign calculated 100,000 lives saved by the 8th Amendment.
Further in January this year the Both Lives Matter, a Northern Ireland based organisation, ran two billboards in the North stating, “100,000 people are alive today because of our laws on abortion. Why change that?” The billboards were placed in Belfast and Derry. This prompted 14 complainants who contended that the claim was misleading and could not be substantiated.
The British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), however, ruled the advertisement was not misleading and not in breach of its code. In its 3,370-word ruling published recently, the authority examined the methodologies used by the organisation which mainly focused on a comparison with abortion data from Scotland, but also from England and Wales and ultimately found it was a reasonable estimate. It stated, “on balance, we concluded that the evidence indicated that there was a reasonable probability that around 100,000 people were alive in Northern Ireland today who would have otherwise been aborted had it been legal to do so”. You can read more about this here.
Based on this therefore the number of lives saved in the Republic of Ireland by the 8th Amendment has been very conservatively estimated at 100,000.
1http://prolifecampaign.ie/main/portfolio/detail/07-09-2016-tens-thousands-irish-people-alive-today-thanks-8th-amendment/
2Ibid
IT'S TIME TO RESPECT 