Ms Justice Mary Laffoy:

There were many questions on health. I think it was eight. When we came to dealing with the ballot paper on health, two issues were raised by the members. One was whether "risk" should be qualified by "serious". That was one issue. The second issue was whether there should be a distinction between physical health and mental health. In order to do the job properly, we ended up with all of those questions. There was a focus on health but there was some diversion of opinion as to whether the reason should be limited to "serious risk" as distinct from risk simpliciter. The committee will see the reasons on ballot 4B on page 31. We started off with reasons 1 and 2, which were "Real and substantial physical risk to the life of the woman" and "Real and substantial risk to the life of the woman by suicide". They are the X case reasons, which are set out now in the 2013 Act. Then we got down to dealing with risk to health as distinct from risk to life. There we have questions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. The distinction is that some of them relate to risk simpliciterand others to serious risk and some of them do not have a distinction between physical and mental health. Those questions arose because some of the members felt it was inappropriate to distinguish between physical health and mental health. Have I made that clear?