Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I genuinely appreciate the views of all the contributors to the debate, although I do not agree with all of them and I will be straightforward in saying that. In terms of allowing sufficient time for further debate, we have had 20 years and more. The current hiatus in the body politic is a result of a very particular incident. I am not certain that legislation when it is produced will even address that particular incident. The legislation which the Government will produce will be extremely limited. As long as we have the eighth amendment to the Constitution in place, it will continue to be very limited. We can prescribe the circumstances in which women can have control of their own bodies all we like and we can talk about rape, incest and a threat to the life of the mother, but I note very few people have spoken about the threat to the health of the mother, which is the significant issue.

I know women who having completed a pregnancy have found their health was very seriously impaired for the rest of their lives. We all know women like that. We are not discussing that issue. The difficulty with it is that if we are to legislate strictly in line with the eighth amendment, we cannot include those issues. Our difficulty is that the expectation of the public, including those for and against, is that we will resolve this issue. It is my personal belief, having examined it in great detail, that we will not be able to be able to resolve this issue as long as the eighth amendment to the Constitution remains in place. That is a personal opinion but it is clearly backed up by all the legal opinion I have seen.

It worries me greatly that we still talk about women who become pregnant and if somehow we have to protect children from them. None of us would be here but for the fact that our mothers became pregnant and safely delivered healthy babies. Do we trust those women? Do we trust our mothers and our sisters? What about our aunts and our friends? Do we trust them because that is what this is about? It is about trusting women and ensuring they have the right to make legitimate choices about their own health and well-being. I do not know any woman who makes choices in terms of a termination of pregnancy with any great joy. We have to place that trust.

Some of the notes I made as I listened to the debate are about a book I was recommended to read by Joe McHugh. He is dead now and therefore I can mention him; it seems one can say whatever one likes about the dead in the country, which is something else with which I disagree. Joe McHugh was the city manager in Cork and he was an incredible man. He once said to me that if I wanted to talk about the control of women I should read Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. I suggest people read it. It is still the go-to piece of literature in terms of sexuality for the Catholic Church. I am a practising Catholic; I am not anti-church and never have been. That book refers to Aquinas and his description of women, which is something people should read. They are described as imbeciles and feeble-minded and that children should be taken from them. This is very clearly about control and about the legislation which will be produced in this instance which will be so limited that we will not fulfil the expectations of anyone. I firmly agree and completely appreciate the worries there are about people using termination of pregnancy as a contraceptive. I completely understand that argument and completely agree with it.

However, I do not agree with the type of restriction we are, once again, beginning to place on women and the choices they must make. It is not always a case of rape, incest or foetal abnormality. There are other circumstances we must consider in which women find themselves and with which they must deal. That women do not talk about them in public or that they are not the subject of conversation around the dinner table or in the pub means they take these decisions very seriously. The issue affects them deeply. Are we now to say to them that, unless they are declared mentally unstable, they cannot have a termination of a pregnancy?