Professor Richard Greene:

In response to Deputy Ó Caoláin's comment about the absence of a conclusion, I was giving a factual account, the most recent and detailed account of maternal mortality in Ireland. The only conclusion I can draw is that when we do that we have figures that are very good in comparison to the rest of the western world. It is a marker of the health care provided to women in Ireland. In another conclusion and in partial response to one of Senator Crown's questions, I do not have evidence to support in any way the claim that we are number one or are in the top few with respect to maternal mortality because we do not have termination. That evidence would not stand up internationally when one reads literature on maternal mortality. In fact, many developing countries provide termination and their maternal mortality rates are in the order of between 800 and 1,000 per 100,000.

Countries in Europe which have social and medical termination of pregnancy have the same region of maternal mortality as ourselves, so I do not think such conclusions can be made. What we are looking at is the fortune of an educated, well-fed healthy population with good medical health care which includes a component, as Professor McAuliffe noted, of undertaking the termination of pregnancies appropriately to protect the mother's life.

In response to Deputy Conway's question on women under 18, the answer is "No", thankfully. To answer questions on clarifying the statistics, in table 2 we give the figure of 8.6 per 100,000 and we show a confidence interval thereafter. If this figure is taken on average and worked out statistically we would see no difference between 5, 4.7 and 12.4; we could be anywhere in this group of figures and be the same, so effectively what these statistics show is that we are not dissimilar from the UK.