Ms Breda O'Brien:

As a woman whose primary qualification to be here is as a woman, a mother and a teacher, I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to interact with Members of the Oireachtas at such an important time. I have spent nearly three decades teaching young women who are the primary group to be affected by any decisions made by legislators. In that time I have witnessed something terrifying which members of the committee have also witnessed. I refer to the normalising of suicide so that it becomes part of a menu of options as a response to extreme stress. Like many others, my own family has been touched by suicide. When a girl comes to me in school and whispers, "I don't think I can go on much longer", I take this very seriously. I move immediately to put a circle of protective care around her, beginning with her parents. People have expressed concerns that if we exclude suicide as a ground for abortion that we are somehow stigmatising mental illness. In fact, the grave mistake would be to fail to see that there is a difference.

Doctor after doctor has told us that they never fail to intervene where there is a life-threatening risk to a mother. Someone far more qualified than me, perinatal psychiatrist, Dr. John Sheehan, has said that in the case of suicidal threat, the notion of carrying out an emergency termination is completely obsolete. A better and calmer intervention is needed.

Suicide is different. If we are to enact just and safe legislation, suicide has to be treated differently. The judges in the X case acted in good faith in making their decision. The tragic consequences for Ms C, the first girl after X to whom the test was applied, were a direct result. Ms C had been brutally raped at the age of 13 years. Unlike Ms X, Ms C was psychiatrically assessed and taken to England by the State for a termination. The consequences were disastrous. She has never gotten over the loss of the baby and has made numerous suicide attempts since. Thankfully, none of the attempts has been successful. If we want to trust women, we have to trust the experience of women like Ms C.

The Department of Education and Science has strict guidelines against doing anything that normalises suicide as a response to stress. Journalists would be excoriated if they ascribed a single or a simple cause to suicide because of the danger of so-called copycat suicide or contagion. Yet, by legislating for suicide, crisis pregnancy is being presented, even in very rare circumstances, as something so awful that suicidal thoughts and threats are an acceptable reaction. Anyone with a bit of life experience will know it is not the baby that ruins one's life, it is everybody else. It is the family who will not stand by a woman; the principal who will not give a girl a place in his school; the partner who will pay for an abortion but who will not pay child support. That is what ruins one's life. It is those kind of attitudes which we should act against, not the innocent baby growing in the womb.

If we legislate for abortion on the grounds of suicide, we are doing something seismic. Within a year of enshrining the best interests of the child in the Constitution, something I voted for, we are saying that it is acceptable to end the life of a child because his or her mother is in distress. How can that be in a child's best interests? Nobody objects to life-saving treatment for a pregnant woman, but we mourn and sympathise with the family that loses a baby as a result, even as we rejoice that the mother is still with us.

The expert group report refers to delivering children on the fringes of viability. In the case of suicide, the perinatal psychiatrists say there is never an emergency in which an immediate abortion is necessary. Are we going to ask an obstetric team some morning to scrub up and deliberately induce labour to deliver an extremely premature baby? That premature baby will be at risk of brain damage, blindness and even death. In the case of life-threatening illness in the mother, saving the child would be a triumph no matter what the challenges. Think, however, of the devastating consequences for the child in the case of psychiatric illness. All of this is in the absence of any evidence of benefit to the mother.

Planned Parenthood, the largest single abortion provider in the United States, has stated:

A woman with an unwanted pregnancy is as likely to have mental health problems from abortion as she is from giving birth ... A woman with a history of mental health problems before abortion is more likely to have mental health problems after abortion.

We are being told that in the case of a woman wanting to die by suicide because she is pregnant, abortion is not treatment but, as part of a package, it just might be appropriate medical care. Something that just might help does not meet the test set out in the expert group report, namely, that there must be a real and substantial risk which can only be avoided by a termination of the pregnancy. Nobody the committee has heard, from any viewpoint, has even gone near suggesting that an abortion meets the criterion of being the only way of preventing suicide. Something that just might be appropriate medical care is a very shaky foundation on which to build legislation.

Martin Luther King, from his jail in Birmingham, made the observation that there are just and unjust laws. We have a moral and legal duty, he said, to follow just laws and a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Legislating for the provision of abortion on the grounds of suicide would be both unsafe and unjust.