Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am always happy to engage on language but I am not going to give a commitment that we can come up with better language because this is not just a letter from 24 doctors. These are the 24 doctors who make up the maternal foetal medical specialist group who are drawing up the clinical guidelines and the care pathways for women. I am not going to change language to give language that would be nicer to have, if that language means that women cannot have the service. That is the difficulty. We all want language that is destigmatising but we must ensure that in changing the language we are not stopping the doctors doing what they want and have asked us for so many decades to do, which is to give them clarity.

They have said to us that this wording would cause them to have less clarity. That is what they said to us this morning. We have a job to do in passing legislation while they have a job to do in preparing the clinical guidelines. We need to be careful that we are both respectful of those roles and that they dovetail. I have had good engagement with Deputy O'Connell on this and I fully agree with what she wants to do and why she wants to get there. I am fully supportive of that as I am of Deputy O'Reilly and the others who tabled these amendments but I just need to be extraordinarily careful. Everyone wants us to be careful that we do not end up accidentally providing less clarity for our medics, who say in a letter to the committee, not to me, that this would be the unintended consequence of the proposed amendments. I suggest that we engage between now and Report Stage with my officials and with the legal experts and that I would also further engage with Dr. Peter Boylan as the clinical adviser, and that we would have an honest appraisal of the situation. I do not want to create false optimism or suggest that I think it would be easy to come up with a formula that would provide that legal and medical clarity but I am more than happy to try it.