Dr. Ruth Fletcher:

I wish to respond to Deputy Ó Caoláin's question about whether the recommendation is equivalent to the merging of heads 2 to 4. In short, the answer is "Yes". Having extra procedures and extra personnel required in the case of suicide risk is effectively discriminatory against people who threaten suicide.

The effect of my recommendation is to remove that kind of discriminatory provision within the heads. The effect could be achieved through having the same test and, effectively, merging heads 2 to 4. Therefore, I would support that.

I will respond to Deputy Healy's question on the definition of the unborn and the possibility for having that definition exclude foetuses with lethal abnormalities. The main argument I was making in terms of having a brief to talk about the ethical arguments today, was that the future potential personhood of those foetuses unfortunately is not going to be achieved. In ethical terms, one is asking women to sustain pregnancies when a future independent life is not going to be achieved at the end of the day. It would be regarded as unethical in that sense in that one is imposing suffering when a good is not going to be attained out of that suffering at the end of the day.

On the legal point in D v. Ireland, given the ethical arguments and given the legal possibility of defining the unborn in a way that it would exclude foetuses who have these particular extreme conditions, which mean that they cannot survive birth, that would achieve the delivery of the State's argument in D v. Ireland which, in effect, meant that D lost her case before the European Court of Human Rights because she had not gone to a local court in Ireland. The European Court of Human Rights said that argument could have been made before a domestic court and therefore the case was thrown out. That gives the Legislature an added responsibility to act on behalf of those women given that this case was thrown out by the European Court of Human Rights on the basis of that argument because it believed in the possibility that Irish courts and the Irish Legislature could interpret Article 40.3.3^oin this way. The Legislature does have a moral obligation to pick that up as well.