Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I wish to signal a couple of points I intend to raise on Report Stage. First, I intend to bring forward an amendment which would insert a definition of "appropriately qualified practitioner" in line 25 of page 5. This relates to other amendments we will propose further down the road. In some places the current draft Bill is too prescriptive about who the practitioners should be. We need to debate that and I will propose that we have a heading that refers to a definition of appropriately qualified practitioners. That would include general practitioners, medical practitioners, midwives, obstetricians, gynaecologists and so on. That relates to other matters. I will also table an amendment on the definition of the unborn in section 2 which is problematic in that it defines human life as beginning at the point of implantation. This is a contentious issue to say the least and may cause problems in dealing with the issue of inevitable miscarriage and fatal foetal abnormalities that I would like to see dealt with. Many others have expressed their willingness to deal with this further down the line, whether in this legislation or elsewhere.

Finally, the issue we discussed earlier in respect of section 2 for the Government to consider, will be the subject of some amendment. In fact the Minister prompted the thought. He has referred constantly to viable life as the key definition. To Deputies who were concerned about what the Minister described as a misplaced fear that a baby that was born might be destroyed, he referred to viable life as the key issue. Working in another direction, that definition is very significant in terms of the debate we had about fatal foetal abnormalities because while the Minister rightly used that definition it also has an impact on the debate about whether the Minister's legal advice on fatal foetal abnormalities is correct if we talk about pregnancies in which the life is not viable and therefore there is not a clash with the right to life of the unborn because there is not a viable life. We are not talking about a viable life. I want to signal my intention on that issue.