Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister for Health, Deputy Reilly, to the House and I greatly welcome the introduction of this Bill. The debate on this Bill in this and the other House is truly historic because it represents the first time that we as legislators have faced up to our responsibility to women in crisis pregnancies by directly addressing the issue of abortion, instead of leaving it to the courts or to the people for law-making by referendum. Never before in the history of the State have legislators addressed the issue directly through legislation.

The Joint Committee of Health and Children held lengthy hearings on the issue, in which I participated actively and I pay tribute to the Chairman, Deputy Jerry Buttimer, as others have done. We will have a respectful and intense debate in the Seanad on the terms of the Bill.

I very much welcome the start of the debate in the Seanad 30 years after the insertion of the eighth amendment to the Constitution in 1983, and 21 years after the X case at which time Mr. Justice Niall McCarthy said the failure to legislate by then was already unfortunate and inexcusable. We will finally provide legal clarity for women and for their medical advisers as to when abortion may be carried out to save women's lives. This is in line with a long-standing Labour Party commitment. I am very proud as a Labour Party Senator that this Government is finally taking this action and that we as legislators will introduce this Bill now. I am also personally proud as a person who some 24 years ago, when I was a student union officer in Trinity College, was threatened with prison for providing desperate women in crisis pregnancy with information on where they could access abortion in Britain. I certainly will be voting in accordance with my conscience in support of the Bill in this House.

As a mother of two daughters and a pro-choice feminist I would like to see the law go further and see abortion being made available in Ireland under the sort of legislation that operates in almost every EU jurisdiction. However, I accept we must operate within the parameters of the Constitution under the eighth amendment, Article 40.3.3°, and within those parameters it is long overdue for the Oireachtas to pass legislation to protect the lives of women and girls.

I remind colleagues that once we have legislated for the most extreme situations of pregnancy threatening women's lives, we know that 4,000 women a year will continue to travel from Ireland to access abortions in England under the 1967 Abortion Act that is lawful there. Those numbers represent the women who give an Irish address. We know others give addresses in Britain and we know others travel to other jurisdictions. We know there are women and girls who may seek to carry out abortions in Ireland by purchasing abortifacients over the Internet. This is a real issue. We all know these women. Some 80 women at a minimum travel each week. I believe as legislators it is our duty to look to address the real reproductive health needs of these women. I think we can only do that ultimately by repealing the eighth amendment.

There is clear public support for the sort of legislation I am talking about which would allow abortion on the grounds of rape or incest, of risk to health and for fatal foetal abnormalities. The silent majority are well ahead of politicians on this issue. The Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Rabbitte, may not speak for all of us in the Labour Party on that. It is arguable that we could have gone further with the legislation even within the terms of the Constitution, and indeed in June 2012 I co-authored a letter signed by a number of Deputies and Senators, including my colleagues Senators Hayden and O'Keeffe, asking the Minister for Health to consider the inclusion of fatal foetal abnormality in the legislation based on an analysis of the European Court of Human Rights case of D v. Ireland in which the Government had argued that Article 40.3.3° might well allow for abortions in cases where the foetus had an abnormality incompatible with being born alive. Having made that argument in one case, it is certainly arguable that the State should now be including fatal foetal abnormality within the terms of the legislation. I think there will undoubtedly be domestic litigation on this issue. I accept that including it in the Bill would have put the Bill at risk of not withstanding constitutional scrutiny and would have made its status less certain. It is something we must return to following the passage of this Bill.

Similarly I regret that we are including in the Bill the criminalisation of the woman or girl who seeks an abortion. There is an alternative legal approach to take within the confines of the Constitution, as Dr. Ruth Fletcher argued very powerfully during the Joint Committee Health and Children hearings in May. I accept that the Attorney General's advice to the Government was otherwise and to have left out the criminal provision might again have rendered the Bill less robust constitutionally. I very much welcome the fact that between the Heads of the Bill and the final version a change was made to the drafting of the criminal offence. Dr. Frank Callanan pointed in the joint committee hearings that the wording of the offence was too broad in its previous inception. I am glad to see that has been narrowed somewhat.

Essentially, this is a conservative restrictive Bill that is very carefully crafted to be well within the terms of Article 40.3.3° in the X case judgment. For those of us who are pro-choice we must accept there are many arguments that will have to be made on another day in terms of providing for abortion on wider grounds. For today and the rest of this week and next week we will be debating the terms of this Bill and the fact that we have a duty under the X case of 1992 and a duty in accordance with the wishes of the people to uphold that case as expressed in the referenda in November 1992 and again in March 2002.

It is also worth saying that the Supreme Court itself has upheld its judgment in the X case on two separate occasions, in 1995 and again in 1997 when it could have revisited and indeed changed the X case precedent. We have an international duty as others have said in accordance with the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in A, B and C v.Ireland in December 2010 when the court found that Ireland was in breach of the European convention in failing to provide an accessible and effective procedure whereby a woman whose pregnancy posed a risk to her life could access a lawful abortion in Ireland. Following that judgment and this Government's commitment to look at how to implement it, we saw the publication of the expert group report at the same time as the understandable and justifiable public outrage at the tragic death last October of Savita Halappanavar in Galway University Hospital. Her death certainly highlighted the lack of legal clarity over when doctors may intervene to terminate a pregnancy which poses a risk to a woman's life. It highlighted the grey area currently existing for doctors as many obstetricians and consultants put it so eloquently. The publication of the expert group report confirmed what we should already have known and it should not have taken a death to show us that we needed to legislate to provide for legal clarity. I urge colleagues who have not done so to date to read the expert group report in full because it sets out a very clear blueprint for the legislation we are currently debating. It points out for example that procedural rights need to be provided for by the Government. That is what the Bill does. As the Minister stated, it provides procedural rights.

The Bill also addresses a number of questions that have arisen during the course of the debate and that have arisen already today. First, the specific issue of suicide risk. As the expert group points out it would simply be unconstitutional to seek to legislate for the X case without including risk of suicide as a potential risk to life, on which a pregnancy might be terminated. Many anti-abortion activists have been critical of the X case judgment, notwithstanding the fact that it has been confirmed by the people on two occasions and by the Supreme Court itself on two other occasions. They have been critical of the judgment arguing that it is too easy to fake suicide risk and that it would somehow open up the law to abuse, the slippery slope argument we have heard. This argument is profoundly demeaning to women, suggesting that women are so deceitful they will be queuing up to pretend we are suicidal to get an abortion. It is demeaning to psychiatrists who have professional training in assessing suicide risk and who informed us very clearly of that during the hearings of the Joint Committee of Health and Children. It is highly restrictively framed.

There has been some argument that the Bill is similar to the British 1967 Act, but anyone who looks at the 1967 Act will see that the ground of mental health is more broadly defined than the ground of real and substantial risk to life set out by the Supreme Court in the X case. We know that it is simply not true to say that pregnant women and girls are never suicidal and again we heard evidence of that. It may be rare but it certainly arises that women or girls may become suicidal during pregnancy. This is not just due to mental illness, and indeed if we look at the X case, there was no suggestion that X had any sort of psychiatric illness, that her suicidal ideation arose because of the circumstances of the pregnancy. To those who say that abortion is not a treatment for suicide, there is no treatment for suicide. We have heard this time and again from psychiatrists, and from theCollege of Psychiatrists of Ireland's representatives, Dr. Anthony McCarthy, Professor Veronica O'Keane and others. There is no treatment for suicide. What psychiatrists do is assess risk of suicide and ways to prevent that risk. There may be rare cases, but cases have arisen such as the X case, in which the only way to prevent suicide is to terminate a pregnancy, where the pregnancy itself is the cause of the risk. I urge colleagues to look at the compassionate and eloquent words of the Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Finlay, in the X case, in which he speaks about the clear psychological evidence offered to the court as to the extraordinarily severe risk of suicide faced by that young girl. The evidence in that case was not challenged by the State and indeed was agreed.

The only issue that has been raised and I know we will be dealing with, is the issue of term limits. We are legislating for the most restrictive form of abortion, namely, abortion only where necessary to save a woman's life. We cannot insert term limits because it would endanger the lives of women to say that an abortion can only be carried out to save their lives up to a certain time. What we can do and what we know from what Dr. Rhona Mahony and the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologist told us, is that where the foetus is viable or may be viable then of course doctors must make every effort to ensure the vindication of the life of the foetus. Instead of performing an abortion, they will deliver the baby early. That is current medical practice and I can refer colleagues to the words of Dr. Rhona Mahony and Professor Fionnuala McAuliffe during the health committee hearings. The expert group report sets that out very clearly as well. The clear duty and the clear medical practice is to ensure early delivery and the subsequent appropriate neonatal care.

We know that legislation is essential to ensure that women's lives are protected.

Sadly, we have learned in the past year the true cost of legislative inaction. I see the introduction of this legislation as a real step forward for women. It is highly restrictive. Most women will continue to travel to England but it will provide a clarity of procedure for the very small number of cases where women's lives are put at risk by the continuance of their pregnancy, particularly young girls in care who cannot make the journey or make the arrangements for the journey themselves. It also marks a key moment in the relationship between Church and State with the legislators facing down intimidatory tactics of clerics and also, for the first time, marks the issue being brought into the Oireachtas. I see that as significant progress. I commend the Bill to the House.