Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests. They are very welcome as fellow human beings who are lucky enough to be alive. While welcoming Professor Pras, I am disturbed although not surprised by his presentation. He bears a great title of UN special rapporteur on the right to health and he has an important brief. It is vital that the UN succeeds in its mission in the world at so many levels. However, I consider that he is operating on what seems to me a very corrupted understanding of human rights, if on the one hand he can talk so much and no doubt so sincerely about the need to eliminate violence and violence against women in particular without acknowledging that violence against the unborn is what we talk about when he promotes abortion as a right. I think he has a very corrupted understanding about human rights. I do not see how we can talk authentically about human rights unless we include the whole human community.

More than the problem of misunderstanding human rights is the damage Professor Pras does to his ability to get buy-in on so many important issues around the world from so many different states. Let us acknowledge and salute on this International Women's Day the countless women who oppose abortion not for anachronistic, religious or philosophically idiosyncratic reasons as some would have us believe, but because they have an essential idea that human dignity belongs to all and starts with the protection of the most vulnerable, and that there is always a better solution than the taking of an innocent human life.

In his presentation Professor Pras did not mention the baby or the foetus. He does not appear to acknowledge that abortion involves the killing of a child and that is a serious problem given the brief that he holds. He also said some very tendentious things, for example, stating so matter of factly that the criminalisation of abortion leads to a higher number of maternal deaths when he is in a country that, since 1983 as a matter of human rights and constitutional law, has upheld the equal right to life of mothers and their unborn children and has done so in a way that allowed Ireland to be consistently among the countries with the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world. Medics here have become highly skilled at seeking to protect mothers and their unborn children and where necessary medical interventions to save mothers’ lives have always enjoyed top priority. That has been the Irish experience. To be unable to acknowledge another reality, that the non-legality of abortion in Ireland has meant that Ireland has a very significantly lower abortion rate than other countries, taking into account what Deputy O'Reilly has to say about the sad reality that some Irishwomen travel-----