Lucinda Creighton (Dublin South East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am deeply concerned about it and I appeal, as I have done a multitude of times, to the Minister for Health to listen to the evidence put forward by medical experts and the psychiatrists the Minister is asking to administer the flawed section. They say they cannot do it. Please let us listen to them and please let us not enshrine flawed logic and flawed legislation on our Statute Book. The legislation may be reversible but the consequences of the legislation are not reversible. They will change the culture in this country and they will change how we deal with vulnerable women. Why can the Minister not accept the proposal that we put in place a clinical care pathway for vulnerable women feeling suicidal thoughts or feeling at risk of suicide during pregnancy? Why can we not talk about improving services and standards and putting in place the kind of clinical care path accepted as best practice in the United Kingdom? Why must we be the poor relation in terms of the service we provide to vulnerable people? Why are we insisting that abortion, which has no medical grounding, will be enshrined in our Statute Book as the only treatment for women who find themselves in that desperate place? I am lost for words because I cannot understand why this proposal is being insisted upon by the Minister and his Government.

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