Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Every year, 4,000 to 5,000 Irish women go to England or other European countries for abortions. Those are the ones we know about as they provide their names and addresses. They are single, married and divorced women. They are of all ages and come from all parts of the country. They go for 4,000 to 5,000 individual human reasons. Over the last 30 years, at least 120,000 to 150,000 women have left the island to have abortions. I have a very simple question about this. If the facility to have an abortion in England or elsewhere had not been available off the island, how many of the 120,000 women would have been in the nearest river? Answer that very relevant question. Such abortion facilities save women's lives and have over the last 20 to 30 years saved many women's lives and prevented suicide. If one believes their lives are about their mental, emotional and physical health, such facilities may have saved their lives. Without the availability of medical abortions off the island, the consequences over the last 20 to 30 years might have been catastrophic for some women.

If, as many claim, women are devastated for life after an abortion, where are the 150,000 mentally unstable, devastated women hiding? Certainly, they are silent because of the profound privacy of their actions. Over 18 years of age, their actions are nobody's business but the business of the individual women and their partners. Certainly, it is not the business of the Catholic hierarchy, the less about which I say the better. In all the years I have lived and worked on the island, I have never met a woman who has had an abortion without understanding the enormity of the mental anguish of the decision, the enormity of the emotional excavation of the decision, the personal human loss, the private human need, the intimate human fear, the mortal human terror, the fragile human tragedy, the subjective human relief and the universal and personal nature of her individual subjective reasons for her decision and action. Never have pornographic terms and tired, medieval clichés such as "opened floodgates", "free-for-alls", "abortion on demand" or "culture of murder" entered their heads. It is the language of righteous extremism masquerading as reason.

There has been talk around the House about conscience. There have been speeches about conscience and sleepless nights about conscience. We hear about being ruled by one's conscience and counselled well by one's conscience. The suggestion is that as a major supporter of the Bill, I am not being counselled by my own conscience and am being ruled by something opposite. If so, I would like to know what it is. I will tell the House simply what I am ruled by. If abortion was not available for the 4,000 to 5,000 women who have travelled outside the jurisdiction for abortions they wanted or needed for whatever reason, including rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormality, and for the women who will continue to travel for abortions outside the restrictions in the Bill, my conscience tells me that many of them would be in regional rivers. If one of them ended up in one such river, the legislation is correct and we should pass it without a second thought. While I do not think it goes far enough, that argument is for another day.