Mr. Peter Thompson:

I wish to add to the Deputy's final point. As a junior doctor, I found it was quite difficult to come to terms with risk and why certain people have babies with abnormalities and who are the high-risk people. The easiest analogy I can see in our practice is that everybody talks about older women being at increased risk of having babies with Down's syndrome. However, most babies with Down's syndrome are born to younger women. That is because younger women have more children. It is just a factor of how many children are born in that cohort. If only women over a certain age are screened - when I started my career it was those over 37 in the UK - then the majority of babies with Down's syndrome will not be picked up.

I am trying to work backwards through some of the questions. There are figures on marital breakdown. I think there are well-published figures on marital breakdown in families where a baby has been born with trisomy 21. I would not like to quote what they are, but they are definitely there. The psychological and mental stress that people go through when they have a baby with a difference is huge. I do not want to talk about clauses C and D, because that is not part of my practice any more. However, the babies in the cohort we are talking about are very different because these are wanted babies where women have gone a significant part of the way through their pregnancies telling their families they are going to have a child and when the child is going to be born.

They then get this devastating news that the baby has some major difference. We should not be sidelined by the occasional story of babies with talipes or cleft lip or the like, we should be concentrating on the major differences that these babies have. More than half of them have significant chromosome or central nervous system differences. This puts the parents under huge stress and makes it difficult for them to make these decisions. We never give a diagnosis and then agree to a termination on the same appointment unless we are giving a second opinion to another centre. If people had been given a diagnosis at another centre, decided that they wanted somebody else to check, and had already been given all of the information, then we would agree to terminate at that point. Otherwise, however, we make parents go away and think about things.

In response to the question on preconceived parameters and leaving matters to the medical profession, I think that the medical profession in Ireland would want some support from the Legislature. I come back, however, to the section of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority Act, HFEA, which talks about two independent clinicians coming to an opinion formed in good faith. I can essentially make a decision that could be wrong but if I have done so in good faith then I would be acting within the law. This is very important because we as a profession try to keep up to speed with professional development - I would like to think that I certainly do. Nobody gets everything right all the time, however, and we have to acknowledge that. None of us in any walk of life would say that we are perfect, but if a doctor makes a decision in good faith then that is what the law needs to protect.