Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail)

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. This matter is the need for the Minister for Health to clarify the person, persons or bodies that recommended the nomination of each of the 14 members of the recently announced expert group to examine the options to deal with the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the A, B and C v. Ireland case, other than the Medical Council and An Bord Altranais, and the criteria used for selection. The expert group has a difficult task on this sensitive issue, which is to bring forward a series of options on the fundamental issue of balancing the right to life of a mother and that of her unborn child. I welcome the Government's decision that the expert group should bring forward a series of options rather than just a single recommendation. In that regard I also draw attention to the fact that the Fine Gael Party, in a pre-election commitment, vowed not to introduce abortion legislation and said that pregnant women will receive whatever treatment is necessary to save their lives and the duty of care to preserve the life of the baby will also be upheld. I subscribe fully to that and I hope there will be no deviation from it.

Ireland has a very impressive record over many decades on maternal safety and safe births. Indeed, a recent UN report on the safety of mothers during pregnancy ranked Ireland at the top of the class, a position that must not be compromised in the future and one which, it is to be hoped, the expert group will keep to the forefront of its deliberations. Advocates of abortion should reflect carefully on this and consider that countries such as Britain and Holland, where abortion is readily available, lag behind Ireland with regard to the safety of mothers in pregnancy. In fact, Ireland is safer than a plethora of countries with greater economic resources than ours and with wide-ranging legalised abortion.

The European Court of Human Rights judgment arises from the Supreme Court decision in the X case which held that abortion is lawful when there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother, and that such risk included that the mother might commit suicide. However, the Supreme Court, surprisingly, reached this verdict without hearing any expert psychiatric evidence. We will all remember the circumstances. We were in the middle of a general election campaign and this became an election issue. As a consequence it did not get the kind of examination it should have got.

In the intervening 20 years, research has increased our knowledge of potential adverse mental health effects associated with abortion and has been greatly advanced in review studies. This raises serious doubts about basing our legislative response on a judgment that lacked the informed findings of more recent research.

In Britain, a high proportion of the 190,000 abortions that took place in 2010 were based on psychiatric grounds. This should be instructive for us and for our expert group, who would be well advised to take account of Professor David Fergusson, particularly given his own personal position as favouring the right to choose. In that regard, it is interesting that this British assumption has been challenged by him since more sophisticated studies have been conducted. Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2009, Professor Fergusson concluded that his research clearly suggested that an unwanted pregnancy leading to an abortion was likely to be a risk factor for subsequent mental health problems whereas an unwanted pregnancy leading to birth was not a risk factor for these problems. He concluded that we should be careful in that regard.

Pivotal to the deliberations of the expert group is how the series of options may be ultimately shaped. Therefore, how the people were selected and whom they represent are important components of what the outcome might be. The abortion industry has resources, influence and long tentacles. Planned Parenthood in the United States, for example, had 330,000 abortions in 2010 and facilitated only 841 adoptions. This is a value of life issue. Let us not diminish society's respect for the inherent value of every human life.