Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I have a health topic for the Minister of State, as he peruses different topics here today.

Following on from the "RTÉ Investigates" programme broadcast last night - I hope the Minister of State has seen it and, if not, I would certainly recommend he take a look at it - I want to ask the Minister, or the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, on behalf of the Minister, when the recommendations of the O'Shea report will be enacted and what timeline the Government has put in place for examining those recommendations and enacting them. Anyone who saw the programme last night will surely agree that we are in urgent need of legislative action. The documentary shone a light on the harsh reality of the exclusionary and restrictive provisions of the law. I refer to the Marie O'Shea report. This review was published in April 2023, yet progress on many of the recommendations is awaited.

The call for immediate action is also reflected in the conclusions of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health, of which both Deputy Colm Burke and I have been members. Its December 2022 report supported the review's recommendations, describing them as necessary measures to ensure the 2018 Act meets the needs of women and pregnant people. The health committee report called on the Government to advance the implementation of the report without delay.

I acknowledge efforts to improve operational aspects of abortion services in the past year, including that 17 of the 19 maternity hospitals are now providing care, but we still have significant barriers to equitable and accessible abortion services. These barriers include ongoing criminalisation, the mandatory and patriarchal three-day wait, inadequate data collection, lack of safe access zones, uneven geographical coverage and the narrow rigid legal criteria for abortion access after 12 weeks, including the 28-day clause for fatal foetal anomalies. These obstacles have resulted in women and pregnant people being denied timely reproductive healthcare and, in many cases, being forced to travel abroad.

I do not believe that is what we voted for. I remember spending quite some time on that referendum campaign. We were putting women and their stories out - really hard, difficult stories of fatal foetal abnormalities discovered after 12 weeks, having to travel and having to live with the shame and secrecy. Those are the things that we went door-to-door talking to people about. I do not believe what we saw last night on that documentary is reflective of what people voted for.

On the documentary last night, we heard about a couple whose baby, Rose, had to be brought back on ice. The couple had to put their baby's body in the boot of the car and cover it with coats in order that they could get it through customs. I do not believe that is what people voted for. Another couple talked about having to leaving their son behind because they wanted to get a post mortem and coming back five weeks later to find their son's body decomposed. I do not believe that is what we voted for in May 2018. I do not believe that is what the people wanted to see continuing to happen to women.

It is estimated that 860 women have travelled from Ireland to the UK to access abortion services since the eighth amendment was repealed, with 85 suspected to have travelled in the first part of 2022. I personally know a number of women who still have to travel. I am stunned that I know people who have to travel. I do not believe that is what we voted for.

We need necessary legislative and operational steps. These include full decriminalisation of abortion in line with the WHO guidelines to remove the chilling effect on healthcare providers. We need to remove the mandatory three-day wait period. We need to review the 12-week gestation limit to ensure women and pregnant people are not timing out of care and forced to travel abroad. The citizens' assembly recommended a 22-week cut-off limit for fatal foetal abnormalities. This is not outside the realms of what was discussed during the process we got to ahead of 2018. We need to recruit a HSE primary care lead for termination of pregnancy to address gaps in training, guidance and data collection.We need to expedite the safe access zones legislation. We will be dealing with that in here later today. We also need to regulate rogue crisis pregnancy agencies, which are acting with impunity.