Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To be helpful, I will respond in respect of the other amendments in the group. I will reflect on the point Deputy Joan Collins has made. My only concern relates to not wanting to put wording in the legislation which, from her perspective and mine, would be an accurate reflection of what the people voted for but which would not tally with or match that contained in the Constitution. I need to take very seriously the legal advice available to me. None of us wants to do anything that would accidentally undermine the legal certainty of the legislation.

Amendment No. 3 refers to inserting the word "abortion" into the Bill. We had quite a lengthy debate on this matter on Second Stage and people made the point that the Bill is about providing abortion in Ireland and asked why that word is not included in the Bill. The word "abortion" is not in the Constitution either. When the Oireachtas decided on the wording it wished to include in the Constitution, it decided- and then the people ultimately decided - to use the phrase "termination of pregnancy". The legal advice available to me is that we need to align the wording in our legislation with that contained in the Constitution. If we were to include the word "abortion", the time to do so was when we were amending the Constitution. Providing absolute clarity and consistency between the words in the Constitution and those in the legislation is the legal advice available to me that I feel is important to share with the committee. Obviously, the Bill will provide access to abortion services in Ireland that are not available today and that certainly would not have been available so long as the eighth amendment remained in the Constitution.

The wording and the definition have also been considered from a medical perspective and this is also important. These are not just legal arguments, although the legal arguments from my perspective are deemed to be strong. It is also about ensuring clarity for medical practitioners practising the field. To define "termination of pregnancy" in any way other than as currently done in the Bill could have implications for obstetric practice. To be very clear, the purpose of the legislation is not to regulate obstetric practice. That is a much broader discussion. It is simply to make sure that we regulate the provision of the termination of pregnancy.

In the context of references to ending pregnancy, on not all occasions that an abortion takes place is a pregnancy being ended because, of course, there can be multiple births. We can have a situation where there are twins involved. For a number of reasons, this wording has been considered very carefully. The phrase "termination of pregnancy" matches the wording in the Constitution. We have engaged with medical practitioners in respect of the wording, which provides them with a degree of certainty that other formulations might not provide in terms of multiple births.