Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 8:

In page 5, lines 26 and 27, to delete "section 9 certification".

This amendment is a consequential amendment to the suicidal intent element within the legislation. I support the medical treatments provided for in this Bill, which are, without a shadow of a doubt, based on medical evidence. However, I have a difficulty with regard to treatments that are not based on any medical evidence. This abortion Bill is not a medical or psychiatric response to suicidal ideation. It is a political response to a flawed, medical evidence free Supreme Court judgment. In many ways, this legislation is a compromise hatched at the Cabinet table between Fine Gael and the Labour Party. Now, because of this Bill, it will become a treatment without the necessary medical evidence.

We should put medical evidence at the centre of this Bill. We know, first and foremost, that abortion extinguishes the life of the unborn child. It is often damaging to the health of the mother and it increases maternal suicides. The most up to date in-depth analysis and longitudinal surveys carried out internationally on this have come to this conclusion. We are told that the provision in the Bill will not open the floodgates to abortion, but nobody in this Chamber knows how many abortions will be carried out on the basis of this legislation. All we know is that where countries have legislated in this area, there has been a radical increase in the number of abortions over a period of time. Even if there is not a radical increase in the number of abortions, how many medical evidence free abortions are tolerable in our society?

We have been told over and over again that this Bill will only provide for a situation where a woman will commit suicide and both the mother's life and the child's life would be lost. In fact, the Bill does not provide for that, because the system it uses to predict the probability of suicidal intent, as we heard repeatedly at the oral hearings, has only a prediction accuracy level of 3%. Therefore, current figures indicate that on 97% of the occasions where a psychiatrist identifies a patient as likely to commit suicide, the psychiatrist gets it wrong.

I can wholeheartedly support the part of the Bill that provides for treatments founded on medical evidence, but when this Chamber reaches a state where it legislates and composes policy for areas outside of medical evidence, we are in trouble. We need to ensure that both the legislation and medical evidence are fully orientated towards each other and do not take different directions.

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