Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Those of us who have the honour and privilege to be elected to this House assume a unique responsibility. We have a particular duty of care to the men and women of our country, that in upholding our Constitution we enact laws which will protect them.

We are all aware of the significance of this Bill and of the complexity and sensitivity of the issues that it addresses. We are aware, too, of the deeply held personal beliefs of many in Irish society, on both sides of this debate; differing beliefs that are reflected within my own party, as in other parties. What we should be very clear about, however, is that at its heart, the core purpose of the Bill is the protection of women's lives.

Every year, some 70,000 women give birth in Ireland. For the vast majority, the outcome is a welcome and happy one. Despite the many pressures on our health service, Ireland is still, statistically, a safe place to give birth. As we sit here in this House today, being pregnant in Ireland means being in an uncertain legal and medical position. Those 70,000 women do not today know for certain whether if their pregnancy results in a life-threatening situation they will be able to obtain all necessary medical care. It is as simple as that. The purpose of this Bill is to give that certainty to those women, their partners, families and loved ones; a certainty to which they are entitled not only in law but in all common decency: the certainty of knowing that if they if they become ill to the point where their life is at risk, their doctor will be able to act to save them, not a general vague assurance, a nod and wink or a throw of the dice but legal certainty. This is about legal certainty around a woman's right to life during pregnancy. It is about trusting women when it comes to their medical care and providing for a very basic human right. No amount of confusion, scaremongering or misinterpretation changes this reality.

It is 30 years since the 1983 amendment that introduced a constitutional ban on abortion and 21 years since the X case which tested it, a test that some opponents of this Bill want to disregard, or, even better, overturn. It is worth recalling what the X case was about, namely, a 14 year old girl who became pregnant following rape by a neighbour and was suicidal. Her family, in attempting to protect her, found themselves before the courts. In the end, the Supreme Court found that suicide is a risk to the life of a pregnant woman, a risk that is rare but one that is real and cannot be ignored. Yet, more than ten years after X, it was left to another woman to ask the courts and not her doctors to determine the treatment to which she was entitled in case of risk to her life. This was Miss C, a cancer patient in remission, who successfully appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. That is the judgment to which this Government pledged to respond.

Some opponents of this Bill want to turn the clock back to Ireland of 1983, an Ireland, where a woman's right to life is not self-evident but can be parsed and weighed by lawyers, one that would risk the life of a suicidal 14 year-old rape victim, as though suicide was not fatal, where a cancer patient who is pregnant cannot get an answer from her doctors about to what treatment she is entitled, where a young woman is miscarrying and at risk of infection, but whose care is tragically delayed and an Ireland that sits back and simply accepts that this is how women are treated. We are no longer that Ireland. I am the leader of a party that has fought for decades to change that Ireland, to make it a more modern, equal and compassionate place, to take the State out of people's bedrooms and to liberalise our laws. We have campaigned for over a decade, and through three general elections, to legislate for the X case. I want to pay tribute today to the men and women, elected representatives and activists, who know what it is to be denounced from the pulpit in their communities for views that, today, are part of the mainstream of public opinion. The Taoiseach, too, has unfairly experienced some of this vitriol from a small section of society that seeks to impose its ideology on the majority.

The tragic death of Savita Halappanavar served to underline the urgent need for legislation that should not have taken 21 years and six successive governments to introduce. When a new Government was formed in 2011, it was then that the decision was taken that this would not be the seventh Government to ignore an inconvenient truth. This is a Government that is legislating for the X case as per its negotiated programme for Government. It established an expert group to consider how it might implement the judgment of the European Court of Human rights, which, within the confines of the Constitution, made recommendations grounded in medical practice, common sense and the law. This is a Government that will legislate for Ireland as it is today, an Ireland whose laws tolerate difference and do not seek to impose the views of one section of Irish society on the whole.

This country, and this Government, is not going back to the days when one church determined the boundaries of women's lives, controlled the most intimate details of people's private lives and held sway over the kind of maternity care women could receive in our hospitals, with devastating results. Those days are over. Ours is a free country, where freedom of religion and freedom of conscience is respected, upheld and defended. This House is a Chamber of democrats and we will legislate in line with our Constitution for today's Ireland.

Am I proud that this Government is finally enacting a law to protect women's lives in pregnancy? Yes I am. Do I believe that this is a perfect piece of legislation? I do not. I have no doubt that it will fall short in the face of hard cases. It cannot offer a woman, facing the trauma of having to carry for nine months a baby that will never survive outside the womb the compassion that she deserves nor can it offer compassion to a woman or a girl who is the victim of rape or incest and pregnant against her will. However I, too, am a democrat. The people voted in 1983 to insert an equal right to life of a mother and her unborn child into our Constitution. Now, 30 years later, we giving effect to that right, nothing more and nothing less.

The debate about this legislation, giving effect to this constitutional right of women, has at times been fraught. Many people in this House and outside it, on both sides of the argument, hold very sincere personal views, and I respect that. What we are being asked as legislators is a very narrow question but it could not be more important. That question is whether we believe that a woman has an equal right to life as set out in the Constitution. The answer, as expressed by this Government in this legislation is, "Yes she does".

This Bill is the product of lengthy consideration, including the considered work of an expert group drawn in the main from medical and legal experts; its report, the subject of substantive consideration by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children and the Government; careful and respectful consideration of the heads of Bill by the same Oireachtas committee; input by many interested parties; careful drafting and preparation of the Bill; and thoughtful discussion of it in the Oireachtas. This is the right thing to do for the women of our country. I, and my Labour colleagues, will be voting for this Bill tomorrow.

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