Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

All of these things are rare but they do happen.

When we have the debate about this matter in this country, I hope that we do not shout each other down and interrupt each other. The problem with this debate in this country is that it has been dominated by the extremes and it is framed in the Catholic versus anti-Catholic view of things rather than what is right and what is wrong. It is framed in terms of Christian ideology versus socialist ideology, being pro-life or anti-life, being pro-choice or anti-choice, as if one could ever reduce it to that. Human experience is not black and white and medicine is not black and white either. The idea that there could ever be perfect legislation that removes all tragedies related to pregnancy and abortion is simply wrong.

Reference was made to the eighth amendment. People calling for its repeal should consider what that means. Simply repealing the eighth amendment means deleting from the Constitution any protection of the life of the mother and the unborn and replacing it with nothing. People need to consider whether that is what they want and whether they want to replace it with a different amendment, for example. Even if we do change the Constitution, it will not change the legislation. The law would not change at all and we would then need to legislate subsequently. I believe it would be a really bad idea in 2015 in the run-in to a general election for us to have that kind of debate in that milieu. We have been there before. That is exactly what happened in 1983. People were put in a position where they made commitments in the run-in to a general election that perhaps they should not have made. Let us not repeat the mistakes of 1983 and have all of that again in 2015. There is a time and a place, I believe, for a considered non-ideological debate and conversation on this matter in this country, but it should not be done on foot of a tragedy or a very hard case and it should not be done in the run-in to a general election.

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