John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

If I have a patient in front of me - there are sometimes two patients in front of me in one person - I will never make a decision that it is not the right decision for the patient. No one is ever going to ask physicians to do that. However, we are constitutionally bound as a result of Professor Binchy's interventions 30 years. The ambiguous constitutional position in which we have found ourselves, despite five referendums and a Supreme Court judgment, means there is no legal way that we can exclude suicidality as a potential cause. If the evidence base in medicine dictates that abortion is never the right thing to do, all psychiatrists will be asked to do is tell the patient before them that abortion will not fix their suicidality and refuse to sign off on an abortion. Why can that not be the case?