When access to abortion is threatened, pregnant women die. This is hardly a surprise to those with the imagination to cast their minds back to the years when knitting needles, gin and hot baths and backstreet criminals were the only remedies for an unwanted pregnancy. Childbirth itself is life threatening, but who cares to dwell on that when monomaniacal joy is the only acceptable response to the promise of a child?

Last week two cases told us what happens when abortion is either criminalised, or subject to a growing taboo. The first was that of the 31-year-old dentist Savita Halappanavar, who died after being refused an abortion in a Galway hospital as she miscarried last year, and was told that "Ireland is a Catholic country". Halappanavar died of sepsis and E coli; Dr Peter Boylan, the obstetrician giving evidence to the inquest, believes that had Halappanavar received the abortion she requested, she would not have died. Last week the coroner ruled medical misadventure – how could he do anything else?

If doctors had realised Halappanavar was dying, they could legally have saved her. (This is too like the trials of the ancient witches: if they drowned, they were innocent). The barbarism is reflected in Halappanavar's husband's bewildered eyes: how could this happen in a civilised country? Ireland's abortion laws are a disgrace. No decent Irishman or woman should sleep until they are repealed; instead we have only a recommendation that the law on when exactly abortion is acceptable be clarified.

The second case is the trial of Kermit Gosnell. He is that creature of nightmare, a mad doctor who performed cheap, illegal, late term abortions in what the Daily Mail, inevitably, calls his "House of Horrors" clinic in Pennsylvania. There has been plenty of news coverage about the bits of broken babies in the House of Horrors; rather less on how fear of censure left patients reluctant to complain about Gosnell's behaviour. There is even less on how women went to Gosnell simply because other abortion clinics had protesters outside, or had closed down. And, I think, there is nothing at all on how legal restrictions on abortion in America lead directly to delays, and thus themselves create the necessity for the hated late-term procedure that we can unite in disgust around. The anti-abortion lobby did not create Gosnell, but they facilitated him. Now, of course, they will use him.

Gosnell apparently cut the spines of seven living babies' with scissors; one woman, Karnamaya Mongar, died after receiving an overdose of medication. Predictably, the anti-abortion lobby treat Gosnell as a cracked saviour who has come to reveal the true "reality" of abortion, a convenient devil who will prove the existence of God. It does not matter that what Gosnell did is illegal and he will go to jail. He is a gift to a campaign seeking to force all women, no matter what the circumstances or the results, to carry their babies to term.

Everywhere in America anti-abortion activists harass, imperil and impede safe abortion; they spread misinformation; they seek to close clinics and sometimes they commit murder. These tactics are spreading in Europe; last month the 40 Days for Life movement prayed outside abortion clinics in London for the whole of Lent, a grotesque imposition on vulnerable or sometimes traumatised women. Also last month Abort67, a group that likes to display huge photographs of dismembered foetuses outside abortion clinics on the grounds that women do not "understand" what abortion constitutes, hung one such image outside the Department of Health on Whitehall. (What do they think women seeking abortions think? That the stork giveth, and the stork taketh away?)

In Ireland similar images hang near airports, so women coming to England for abortion will see them and feel what? Self-hatred, of course. The plan is to create widespread public revulsion for abortion. Then they will attempt legislation, always pruning, pruning at that which is humane, and safe.

The anti-abortion lobby hate adult women, I think; give them their way, and they will have more dead women, more thwarted women in poverty and trapped. Forced motherhood is a kind of slavery, because motherhood and autonomy can never coexist. Restrictions on abortion killed Savita Halappanavar; they almost certainly killed Karnamaya Mongar too. We should remember it.

Twitter: @tanyagold1