Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

This is the first chance the Dáil has had to discuss the horrific case of a clinically dead pregnant woman kept alive for 23 days in December against her family's wishes. I wish to convey the sympathies of the Anti-Austerity Alliance to her family who had to endure the tragic loss of their young daughter and then watch the indignities that were heaped upon her. They were forced into the courts to be allowed to bury their daughter over the Christmas period. This was all solely due to the fears doctors have about the eighth amendment.

The Taoiseach has said this is a personal case which is highly sensitive and so on, as if we should keep out of the matter. However, the State is preventing people from making personal decisions about highly sensitive matters and not the other way around.

Dr. Peter Boylan, the former master of the National Maternity Hospital, said that what was done to this tragic woman was grotesque and experimental. Let us be clear that the eighth amendment led to this. No 15-week foetus has ever survived to delivery anywhere on the planet.

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However, doctors told the family this attempt was being made for constitutional reasons.

The resultant details are highly disturbing, but people need to hear the reality of having this law in place. This woman had a ventilator inserted, a tracheostomy tube in her neck, and six syringe pumps for drugs to stop infections. Make-up was applied when her children came to visit to make her look something like she had been. It is all the more incredible that doctors felt they had to take this course of action when an accident and emergency and bed crisis was escalating around them. We ended up with legal representation for the unborn and a deceased woman, all because of the eighth amendment.

This is the third high-profile case of a woman being abused by the eighth amendment under the Taoiseach's watch. This weekend he marched down the boulevards of Paris against religious fundamentalism.

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