John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am very disappointed to hear that we will finish at 10 p.m. and that all of the amendments will not be heard. That is very regrettable.

I shall try to speak to the amendment at hand. Again, we have heard a great deal about evidence-based medicine and the fact there is no evidence basis in medicine, allegedly, for abortion ever being a treatment for a pregnant woman with suicidal intent. I hasten to add, and some of my colleagues have touched on the matter, evidence-based medicine is not something that is decided by legislators. Evidence-based medicine is decided by teams and panels of health care professionals and clinicians after synthesising the data and breached guidelines. Some evidence-based medicine comes from a very high level of evidence derived from large randomised trials. The default position when such evidence is not available is that the best evidence available is the evidence which there is and it may be anecdotal.

The other critical matter about evidence-based medicine is that it is not immutable, it changes. As I pointed out earlier, there are things that I do now that I did not do one month ago. There are things that I did one month ago that I have stopped doing now. It is not because a legislator told me what I should or should not do but because the evidence has evolved. We are in the a situation where if, in theory, there is no evidence-based medicine for ever - and I mean ever - doing an abortion on a suicidal woman in an attempt to prevent her going through with self-harm it will not happen. One will not get three doctors to agree to do this if they follow evidence-based medicine. Clearly, the subtext here is that there will be deliberate malfeasance by doctors in collusion with malfeasant women.