Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am privileged to support the Bill for several reasons. It is very much anchored in two areas of policy that are synonymous with the best traditions of the Labour Party, namely, workplace rights and the vindication of the reproductive rights of women. Pregnancy loss is utterly cruel. It is deeply personal, harrowing and physical and has a lasting emotional impact. For a woman who is going through that cruel loss, it is often far too painful to even discuss. It is not an illness or a sickness, however, and we should not treat it as such. It certainly should not be the case that a woman would be forced to produce the equivalent of a sick note to her employer to explain why she is not at work that day or week, or for her to have to take annual leave to recover or to organise her procedures through the IVF process. A woman who loses a child up to 24 weeks has no statutory entitlement to leave. A blunt and hard line is drawn, and that is inhumane, frankly.

The very fact we are looking at introducing a statutory right to time off at a time of early pregnancy loss says the conversation and the laws need to change. There is demand for this. Momentum is building and this will happen; it simply has to. The compassionate, humane and practical measures contained in the Bill would help to change that conversation and have a real and meaningful impact on the lives of women and couples. It is pioneering legislation and I firmly believe that in five or ten years' time people will sit back and say this is normal and how it should always have been and ask why we did not do it earlier. We need a statutory enforceable right to protected and ring-fenced workplace leave for early pregnancy loss and to accommodate the reality of the fertility journey for thousands of women and couples every year.

There are serious shortcomings in the Government's approach to publicly funded IVF but that is, to an extent, a discussion for another day. It is absolutely perverse, however, that we have correctly decided funded IVF is a public good, yet access could be restricted to those who can work flexibly unless a statutory right to leave to access it is introduced.

As we know, a woman going through IVF is at the mercy of her body as to when procedures happen. As things often do not go according to plan, using annual leave, for example, is fraught with danger and that adds to the anxiety the woman may already have. Procedures include scans, follicle examinations, egg collection, transfer and follow-up consultations. Unless the woman is in Dublin, Cork or another major urban centre where the facilities are available, the chances are she will have to frequently travel for up to several hours to access that treatment. If we are to have full and equal access to fertility treatment, statutory leave must be a vital component, otherwise the Government is selling a unicorn to so many women and couples.

To say Ireland has been conservative and slow on reproductive health rights is an understatement. As the Minister of State is aware, there is grumbling from employer bodies on the raft of employment rights legislation, minimum wage and pension reforms adding to what they describe as their burdens coming down the tracks. Many of the burdens, as they would describe them, the imposition of which was started by the Labour Party several years ago, are coming down the tracks but much of the reform is coming at once. That results principally from the failure of the Government in place from 2016 to 2020 to introduce the kinds of reforms we are seeing now, including those on the living wage, pension reform, pension entitlements and other employment rights.

Like my colleagues, I appeal to the Minister of State not to block or delay the progress of this legislation. It can and should go to Committee Stage. These are compassionate and practical workplace reforms that will make a significant and meaningful difference to the reproductive health rights of women, to their lives more generally and to the lives of couples. I ask the Minister of State not to fall into the trap of viewing reproductive health leave as a burden for business but, rather, as a practical and humane intervention towards a more decent, compassionate and caring society.

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