A vulnerable young woman in Ireland has been forced to give birth by caesarean section, even though she was so desperate for an abortion she was ready to starve to death rather than have the baby. These are almost the only known details of one of the first appeals for permission for an abortion to take place since the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act – allowing for the first time very limited abortion – came into effect at the start of the year. Scant as it is, the news appears to confirm that little has changed in the country’s profoundly anti-abortion stance since Savita Halappanavar died of sepsis in a Galway hospital after being denied an abortion two years ago.

The act, which was a response not just to the Galway tragedy but to a 20-year-old supreme court ruling, was supposed to be revolutionary. But it is so tightly drawn that only where a mother’s life is physically at risk, or where she is suicidal, could the process of approving an abortion even be launched. Victims of rape and incest are explicitly excluded. Then, earlier this month, the Guardian obtained the clinical guidelines under which it operated. They are so restrictively framed that women and girls in severe distress because of unwanted pregnancies continue to face cumbersome and distressing barriers. They could have to see as many as seven different medical professionals before a request for a termination is granted. In effect, as this weekend’s case appears to show, it makes abortion all but impossible even for a suicidal woman.

One of the republic’s most eminent psychiatrists, Professor Veronica O’Keane, warned that the guidelines would leave women at the mercy of a lottery controlled by the members of a local panel. Other campaigners say that anti-abortion members of the Irish medical profession might also erect barriers to suicidal women obtaining terminations in Irish hospitals. The UN human rights commission described the process as “additional mental torture”. Now pro-choice campaigners have submitted a new complaint to the commission, arguing that it is doctors rather than the women themselves who are gatekeepers to abortion. The act has disappointed even the low expectations of campaigners who fought for it.

The Irish Labour party, junior partner in government, has in Joan Burton a new woman leader with a track record on feminist issues. But although Ms Burton was elected to renew the party, she has ruled out a referendum on the constitutional change that would be needed to achieve fundamental change in Ireland’s abortion law. So about 4,000 women a year remain forced to travel to England. For those who cannot, abortion is still all but banned. That surely is one of the most absurd and morally compromising pieces of state hypocrisy in Europe.