Ms Liz McDermott:

I am not going to get into that hypothetical situation. To reiterate a point I made earlier, there are two lives involved. As a country we have to balance, acknowledge and uphold rights and declare what those rights are. The eighth amendment refers to the equal right to life of mother and child.

As for us having that view and acting upon it, I appreciate that many countries do not do that. They have a different perspective on it and make the rights of the child contingent on a range of other circumstances and people's say-so. If we support women and say their babies are important to us as a country and not just to them but that we are in this as a collective - there is a tendency to individualise and thereby isolate people, put them into little cells where one persons says one thing and I say something else - how do we legislate or adjudicate the rights and wrongs in that? This is a collective and the common good must always be legislated for. When women are in extremely challenging circumstances, as happens, the supports need to be there. It is how one views abortion as a solution. Is it a solution? It is not really a solution for a baby. I come back to the point of the trauma of it being carried out, particularly if it is a late-term abortion, in the sense that women want these babies. We want our babies, think our babies are healthy and perfect and then find out they are not. They are very sick, will not survive or will be very disabled. We must form a new relationship with that baby. We cannot just say "well, this is a wanted child" because what is that child now? Our understanding of what that child is has changed because we now know that child is different from the one we had in our minds.