Professor Veronica O'Keane:

I do not know if this has been brought to the committee's attention. These are the official guidelines from the Department of Health for the implementation of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013. If we go to page 1, the second paragraph begins as follows:

The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 was enacted in July 2013 and commenced in January 2014. The purpose of this Act is to restate the general prohibition on abortion in Ireland while regulating access to lawful termination of pregnancy in accordance with the X case and the judgment in the European Court of Human Right in the A, B and C v Ireland case.

The Act achieves this objective in the following ways:

- by providing a clear criminal prohibition on abortion.

These are the guidelines for doctors, on the first page. Any sort of legislation within an unyielding constitutional framework will not be appropriate to the sort of medical care that is practised. It does not allow for unforeseeable circumstances. Good care cannot be dictated by exceptions.

It just cannot be done. If we decided to restrict to rape, for example, would we then have to prove that every woman had been raped? What is rape? The whole thing would be very difficult. I do not know if that is any help in answering what problems could arise from replacing as opposed to repealing the eighth amendment. Medics need the eighth amendment to be repealed in order to have a free field in which we can create a legislative framework to provide the flexibility of care that is necessary in medicine to manage women in these very difficult situations.