Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Ryan and Healy. I acknowledge that this is a historic day. Far from it happening with undue haste, it has in fact been through a lengthy process, including the Citizens' Assembly and the all-party committee. While Deputy McGrath is entitled to his opinion, I do not believe that he would ever see this as having a right time. I come to this debate as somebody who was a member of the all-party Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. That had three months of intensive hearings where what we heard were actual facts, not rhetoric or personal beliefs, but actual facts writ large. Those facts were indisputable. There was medical expertise from across the Irish health care system and, indeed, the international medical community was ad idem. The eighth amendment endangers women, it ties the hands of medics and, ultimately, it puts lives in danger. It was unequivocal. It was no accident that the committee struggled to source medical experts who would take the view that the eighth amendment was a good thing. The reality is that the vast majority of maternal professionals want and need the eighth amendment to be repealed.

I am generally happy with the wording and with the general scheme as has been outlined by the Minister. I commend the Minister, Deputy Simon Harris, for his work on this issue. It was not my experience on the committee that formed my position. In 1983, I strongly opposed the insertion of the eighth amendment into the Constitution, believing that the Constitution is not and never should be the place to deal with a health care issue. Since 1983, we have had to watch as countless women and families have been traumatised and victimised by the application of the eighth amendment. We have been through the alphabet soup of women who have suffered and some who have died. They are just the high-profile cases. That does not necessarily capture the hundreds of thousands of women and medics, some who faced fairly dicey decisions that could have gone either way.

We know the eighth amendment gives an equal right to life to the unborn and the mother. Where there is a risk to health, we heard medics ask us whether they would intervene when it is a 20% risk, a 50% risk, or if they waited until it was an 80% or 90% risk. What parent would want that for a daughter or a sibling for a sister? What child would want his or her mother to be put in that kind of peril? That is exactly what is happening. That is what the eighth amendment means.

The big thing that stood out for me at recent committee hearings and the surrounding debate was the issue of health care and specifically people's right to equal health care. Anyone who has had the misfortune to require a medical procedure will be familiar with the consent form a person or one's next of kin is asked to fill in. That does not happen when one is pregnant. There is no consent when one is pregnant. The eighth amendment precludes consent when one is pregnant. That is a very significant constraint on the medical profession. Put simply, there is no equality of health care in Ireland because of the eighth amendment.

Thankfully, Ireland has changed. It is a changed place since 1983. People realise that life is not black and white. There is a whole sequence of shades of grey which we have seen played out over the decades. We have come on in leaps and bounds with regard to our cultural attitudes, yet the existence of the eighth amendment has ensured that the way in which we treat pregnant women has not progressed at all. There are barbaric cases such as that of the woman whose dead body was essentially used as an incubator while her family had to fight through the courts for the life support to be switched off. Her body was decomposing. People asked what kind of country we are when they saw that scenario. We are a compassionate people. That compassion will and does extend to maternal care. We need to trust our very well-regulated legal profession. Ultimately, we need to trust women and to repeal the eighth amendment.

This is a people's referendum. One can make changes to the Constitution that are often quite technical, about timelines for how long a Parliament might sit or whatever. This is a people's referendum and we are seeing evidence of people engaging. I am seeing it in my constituency. I have been engaging with it and have done some canvassing as well. I will be voting for repeal and I will encourage others to do so too. I urge people to get active, to have conversations about the topic and to put compassion to the forefront of everything that they do over the next weeks and months as we hopefully get closer to providing equality of health care for women in Ireland.

The committee was very clear about the ancillary recommendations, that they were not ancillary but were central to the kind of health care system that we required. Comprehensive and non-religious-based sex education is required. Contraception must be freely available. This is what one does. Education and the provision of contraceptives are the kind of things that will reduce the numbers. They are not ancillary recommendations nor are the recommendations that there has to be equality of maternal care.

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In terms of things such as anomaly scans, it should not matter if one lives in a part of the country that is a significant distance from a teaching hospital. There must be equality for women in the health care system. The committee very strongly wished to have such equality but that will not necessarily find its way into legislation. Resources will be key in that regard. Resources must be provided in a way that respects that this is not just about repealing the eighth amendment but, rather, a much wider range of things that need to be done.

The key issue is that we must repeal the eighth amendment. I will be out canvassing and campaigning to ensure that my party and I play our part in trying to achieve that.

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