As the flock of handsomely renumerated jurists take flight from the Four Courts after deliberating the fate of a 17-year-old girl wishing to terminate her pregnancy, I’m sure I’m not the only one left at the end of this week with a feeling of simmering outrage over the sorry episode.Outrage not just over the faintly obscene spectacle of a vulnerable woman’s plight serving as the casus belli for yet another legal wrangle over abortion, but also fury over the uncharacteristic diligence with which Health Service Executive hampered this woman’s search for a way out of a nightmarish situation. (It seems that a natal scan revealed that her child would be born with anencephaly–enter the term in Google images if you have stomach for it.) It transpires that the HSE not only told the Gardai about the girl’s plans to travel to England, but even roused itself to go to the trouble, according to this report from RTE, of writing to “the Passport Office last week to say it had not consented to the issuing of a passport for Miss D.”If only the HSE applied such doggedness in a positive way.Remember, this is the same outfit that lacked the resources to take action when the parents of a young family visited an undertaker’s to specify the clothes in which their healthy children were to be buried.