Ms Maeve Taylor:

To follow on from that, I think it comes back to the issue of sustainability and thinking into the future. Currently, the National Maternity Hospital is one of the key institutions in regard to the development of excellence in abortion care. It is a key support to primary healthcare providers and the doctors in the National Maternity Hospital have shown a great deal of leadership in establishing and institutionalising abortion care as part of healthcare in Ireland. That has to carry forward, regardless of the location and the ownership of the National Maternity Hospital. That ethos, professionalism and expertise has to transfer with it.

I return to one of Dr. Henchion’s points about the need for a faculty of sexual and reproductive healthcare and a professorship with specific responsibility for the development of excellence in abortion care. Going back to Ms Spillane’s point about how we cannot always rely on the UK, there are many strains and pressures on services in the UK, in particular in regard to advanced training for later abortion care, which is something that we need to develop here. We cannot think only about the new national maternity hospital in terms of the legal documents that will establish it and that are part of the move, although those are extremely important. We have to think about the institutional transfer of all of those skills. Locating a professorship and faculty of sexual and reproductive healthcare within the National Maternity Hospital now would be a really strong way of ensuring the transfer of those skills and excellence, so that clinical appropriateness would be considered within an institution that considered abortion healthcare to be critical to women’s care generally.