Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I fully accept - I do not know of anybody who does not - that Article 40.3.3o is no more and that a new article is to be substituted that states it is our business and ours only.

There is something I find strange about the debate that has been taking place, which started on the day of the count. There are those of us who believe ginmhilleadh is exactly what it says on the tin - gin mhilleadh or destruction. "Rud a mhilleadh" means to destroy something. It is put very eloquently in English in the draft Bill which states: ""termination of pregnancy", in relation to a pregnant woman, means a medical procedure which is intended to end the life of a foetus". That is a very interesting sentence for many reasons and in the context of the debates that have taken place here over many years. Those of us who have had no difficulty whatsoever with any intervention to save a woman's life and said it is not an abortion - I never believed it was - are having our belief vindicated because it has not been included in the definition of "termination of pregnancy" in the Bill

I received a telephone call one day from a lady who must have been born in the early 1940s. I will not disclose how she was thinking of voting in the referendum; that is her business. Laughingly, she said she should not have been here because she had survived cancer and suffered a heart attack but that she should not really have survived birth. She told me that her mother had had a tricky heart problem and, as far as I can recall, that she had been born at either 23 or 24 weeks, which was extraordinary in the early 1940s. She told me that the doctor who was well known had told her mother that there was no way the baby could survive, but she did. I heard the Deputy opposite. I will check with the woman concerned, but I am sure that that is what she said. She received very skilled care, of that I have no doubt, but the basis of the story was that even though the doctor had thought the baby did not have a chance and would die, to save the mother, he intervened. Once the baby was born, every effort was made to sustain it.

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