Dr. Anthony McCarthy:

As the Senator was speaking I was thinking about what Senator Mullen asked. My views on abortion, to a certain extent, do not matter as the women I see who are going to have an abortion are having them anyway. It is such an irrelevant question for me in my practice. The women will have it here, buying their tablets on the Internet, or they will travel. I do not even think about what is happening in the UK except that people have to travel there. They are losing their babies anyway. It is happening.

To answer the Senator's question, as he knows there have been very few such cases. A woman has to see two psychiatrists, who have to agree, and one obstetrician. If everybody agrees on the case, that is it. It is a problem and I know cases have been highlighted where things went very poorly. Some of the psychiatrists who saw patients in those circumstances had never previously dealt with a mental health problem in a pregnant women or seen women in those circumstances. Some of the decisions made led to court orders and various other processes because those who did the assessment never did the work in a daily way before. Of course, there is no adequate provision of psychiatry services around the country.

Fortunately, there is a perinatal mental health strategy that is about to come out and it recommends that there should be full-time psychiatrists in every large maternity unit in the country. It argues there should liaison psychiatry at least part-time in every maternity hospital around the country. It is coming. Fortunately, I was right in that the demand was never going to be there; it has amounted to a trickle. Some of those women have had very faulty assessments as those who saw them had no training in the field.