Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It might interest members to know that the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has recently declared:

Laws which explicitly allow for abortion on grounds of impairment violate the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Art,. 4,5,8). Even if the condition is considered fatal, there is still a decision made on the basis of impairment. Often it cannot be said if an impairment is fatal. Experience shows that assessments on impairment conditions are often false. Even if it is not false, the assessment perpetuates notions of stereotyping disability as incompatible with a good life.

Although Ireland has not yet ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, while I know it was discussed in Cabinet on Tuesday, the recognition of the UN committee on abortion for so-called fatal foetal abnormalities constitutes unjust discrimination against people with disabilities and is clearly something that should be taken into account when proposals are being made to enshrine such unjust discrimination into law. That is worth putting on the record.

As I have said, the Citizens' Assembly is comprised of 99 citizens, headed by Ms Justice Mary Laffoy. It voted overwhelmingly to undermine the rights of the unborn child. From start to finish, the eighth amendment was subject to a process of interrogation which allowed little, if any, scope for the true assessment of its merits to be heard. Our committee has replicated the process with an appalling level of bias displayed. Despite unsustainable objections, this is certainly the case and an increasing number of people see that. If the assembly has its way, unborn human life will now be subject to whims of democratic consensus on what is, in effect, a totalitarian tyranny of the strong over the weak. Abortion without any restrictions up to 12 weeks is being proposed, going up to 22 weeks without restriction for socioeconomic reasons.

There is a sense, however, that the scale of the liberalisation of abortion law being sought by this unrepresentative and unelected body has inadvertently revealed its inherent bias and laid bare its ultimate agenda. Just how unrepresentative it was can be seen from the fact that there was not one representative from 11 of Ireland's 26 counties, including my own. Can members imagine an equivalent situation in the United States, where Congress establishes a non-judicial citizens' assembly to deliberate on the removal of a fundamental human right and omits everyone from Oklahoma, Kansas, Louisiana and several other states in that jurisdiction? That is just to mention a few. It would be an absurd parody of democracy, yet it is acceptable here. The Citizens' Assembly was depressingly choreographed and managed with just enough plausible deniability to make one think that what was occurring was an exercise in deliberative democracy. This added to the illusory sense of transparency. Forget, however, that the overwhelming volume of written and online submissions made to the Citizens' Assembly calls for the retention of the eighth amendment. Such inconvenient details muddy the narrative.

Speaking of muddying the narrative, thanks to the misinformation efforts of abortion advocates over the past few years, one could easily believe that we have a reputation of being a dangerous place in which to be pregnant. This is despite the fact that most comprehensive reports over the last number of years have made it clear that we have excellent maternal care even in the face of obvious funding and staffing problems as we see in all our hospitals, including our maternity hospitals. If there is one thing pro-life people are learning, as this debate gathers pace, it is that efforts to liberalise abortion matter more than a balanced assessment of the facts. We saw this in 2013 when abortion was introduced in defiance of the medical evidence presented at the time with respect to suicidality. All signals are clear that this process is not and never was about arriving at balanced legislation which protects mothers and babies. It is about fine-tuning the debate in such a way as to be able to sell the recommendations to a misinformed public with the minimum of political consequences. Since 2012, over 3,328 abortion pills have been seized in 235 separate illegal importations. This committee has heard deeply conflicting evidence about their safety yet we are considering legalising that here in the teeth of conflicting evidence. To push for abortion, the recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly have been reduced to a single word on a jumper: "Repeal". That is insulting to the tens of thousands of people in Ireland who credit the eighth amendment with saving their lives and those of their children.

I will raise one more issue with regard to the recommendations to introduce abortion for pregnancies of up to 12 weeks. A delegation from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, BPAS, the biggest abortion provider in the UK, attended last week. Today, its brochure was circulated to us. That document is absolutely clear that introducing abortion at the so-called early limit of 12 weeks leads to a real and substantial threat to the life of the mother. The brochure was just circulated to us today. This included the possibility of serious long-term health effects, psychological problems, the continuation of pregnancy despite the abortion, which BPAS tells us occurs in one in every 1,500 abortion cases. None of that has made its way into the debate where abortion is consistently presented as an absolutely safe procedure with a minimum of risk.

I will oppose the recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly and will work to ensure that the merits of the eighth amendment are upheld. Today, we saw a statement from the Danish ambassador to Ireland, who said that in 2016, 133 out of 137 babies found before birth to have Down's syndrome were aborted. That is 97% of all diagnosed cases. Carsten Søndergaard, the Danish ambassador to Ireland, has written to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution to tell it that Denmark does not have an official policy to eradicate Down's syndrome. Given the rate of abortion, it might as well have such a policy. The ambassador told the committee, in the letter, that in 2016, four children were born in Denmark with Down's syndrome after perinatal diagnosis and 20 children were born with Down's syndrome who were diagnosed after birth. He did not tell the committee that while four were born following diagnosis of Down's syndrome, 133 were aborted. It is a huge omission. Last year, 157 women in Denmark became pregnant with a baby with Down's syndrome. As the ambassador points out, 20 were born because no perinatal diagnosis was received and another four were born despite the perinatal diagnosis. To put it another way, while 97% of the babies found to have Down's syndrome while still in the womb were aborted, 85% were aborted overall, which is still a staggering total. In 2015, only one baby found to have Down's syndrome while in the womb was born out of the 144 scanned, so 99.3% were aborted. We know what opening the floodgates of issues like that leads to. It is interesting that we are now trying to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on one hand while on the other we are doing everything we can to destroy unborn babies with any semblance of disability.

I have one comment if the Chairman does not mind.