An amendment to Ireland's constitution in 1983 states that the embryo, even at the point of conception, is an Irish citizen enjoying the full rights of every man, woman and child living in the republic.

The constitutional change, brought in after pressure from well-funded religious right pressure groups, appeared to copper-fasten Ireland's near-total ban on abortions in the state. There are limited circumstances when abortions can take place but these are extremely rare.

The ban means thousands of Irish women seeking terminations for all kinds of reasons, including victims of rape and incest as well as for babies who would be born dead or suffer medical defects, have been forced to travel across the Irish Sea to have abortions in Britain. Since the creation of the Irish state in 1921, Ireland has simply exported its problem to Britain and for decades officialdom ignored its existence.

Abortion was first outlawed under British rule in Ireland in 1861 and can lead to a sentence of life imprisonment, but according to the Irish Family Planning Association, since 1980 at least 138,000 women have gone abroad, mainly to England, to obtain abortions.

The first breach in the wall of silence around abortion came about in 1992 when a 14-year-old rape victim attempted to travel to England to terminate her pregnancy. The Irish government, on the advice of the attorney general, sought initially to prevent her from travelling out of the country. The prospect of a modern European republic seeking to deny a child from leaving the country, and in turn forcing her to endure pregnancy brought on by rape, produced one of the most famous images of the early 1990s. Martin Turner's cartoon depicted a child inside the 26 counties of the Irish Republic shut off by barbed wire and the caption: "The re-introduction of internment … for 14 year old girls."

The 14-year-old in what became known as the X-case was eventually able to leave the country because her legal team evoked legislation contained within the European convention on human rights on the right to travel within the EU – a convention Ireland signed on joining the EEC back in 1973.

Europe and the human individual rights enshrined within various European conventions has been the route Irish women have gone down to try to challenge the abortion ban. In 2009, three unnamed Irish women known as A, B and C sued the Irish government in the European court of human rights claiming the ban usurped their rights as EU citizens.

"All three women complain that the impossibility for them to have an abortion in Ireland made the procedure unnecessarily expensive, complicated and traumatic. In particular, that restriction stigmatised and humiliated them and risked damaging their health and, in the third applicant's case, even her life," their statement to the court read at the time.

The court agreed with the women and ordered the then Irish government to legislate for abortion in certain circumstances. After the fall of the Fianna Fail-Green party coalition, the new administration of Fine Gael and Labour inherited the problem.

Labour is in favour of legislating to relax the absolute ban on abortion. However, Fine Gael, which has its roots in Catholic rightwing nationalism, is divided on the issue. While many urban Fine Gael Dail deputies in liberal-minded constituencies in Dublin are willing to support limited reform, the party's rural base where conservative Catholic values are still strong fears a backlash from the religious right.

Radical anti-abortion groups such as Youth Defence have threatened to picket the constituency surgeries of Fine Gael deputies in rural parts of Ireland and have embarked on a slick, well-funded PR campaign to scare the main governing party from daring to legislate on abortion.

Reform-minded ministers are under further pressure from a separate group of Irish women who spoke openly and on the record (at one time unthinkable due to fear and intimidation) to the Guardian earlier this year about their predicament. The Terminations for Medical Reasons group is made up of women who speak openly about being forced to travel to England for abortions because their babies would have died almost immediately in birth. The group has described the abortion ban as "horrific and barbaric".

There has since been a further crack in the wall of denial built around the abortion issue in the Irish Republic. Marie Stopes's decision to open up a clinic in Belfast that will carry out non-medical abortions for up to nine weeks of pregnancy offers the opportunity for some women in crisis pregnancies to terminate them on the island of Ireland for the first time. It offers the same unprecedented choice to women in Northern Ireland, where the 1967 Abortion Act does not apply, although abortions are carried out in some rare cases inside hospitals in the province where a woman's life is directly under threat.

The horrific case of Savita Halappanavar in Galway will underline the need for reform south of the border although any change in the law is a huge political gamble for the current coalition. However, the present government does have some space not afforded to any other administration in the past. When the religious right forced through the 1983 constitutional amendment the Catholic church was a powerful and feared force throughout the land. Barring a few leftwing deputies, few if any Irish politicians would have said boo to a bishop let alone dare suggest the church's stance on abortion was wrong. Since the deluge of dirt started to cascade over the Catholic church in the way it covered up paedophile priest scandals and child abuse stories the hierarchy's reputation has been shredded in the eyes of the majority of the republic's population.