Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Of all the issues we are discussing this is very serious. We were scrutinising the 28 day period and while that was serious this is important because of Savita Halappanavar and others. For example, we could all speculate, and I often have said that if she had been in another hospital she would be alive today. I believe it was random. My point is that the situation is subjective. Women's health matters. It is annoying that one has to justify to the public why people's health is important. We should not be so defensive about this. Health is health and it matters. If there is a risk to somebody's health from being pregnant that person should have a right to have an abortion and we should not have to apologise for that. It is a question of degrees of suffering to which women are forced to go, which happened with Savita. The point is that we cannot intervene yet because someone is not seriously enough affected and I am fearful that something like that could happen again.

We have not specifically mentioned mental health. As has been pointed out, serious harm to mental health is more difficult to measure. One could say serious harm to physical health involves this condition or that condition but we all know that people who feel suicidal do not even bother arguing about it, they just go to England. They do not have the discussion because they know it would be too difficult but it would be very difficult for people with mental health issues that are ignored or neglected. There seems to be a stage that happened between the eighth amendment committee's report and the drawing up of the legislation. I do not expect the Minister to be perfect and adhere to it but some things were changed and there is a question over who made those decisions and then brought them into the debate on the referendum. At this stage it will be one for the history books.