John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I reassure colleagues who are terribly exercised by the issue of suicidality and evidence-based medicine that we are not legislating guidelines for evidence-based medicine. Such medicine is drawn up by panels of doctors, national steering committees, professional organisations, institutions and faculties within institutions when they have examined the raw data, listened to opinion leaders in the field and read meta analyses. If the weight of evidence-based medicine is that an abortion is never necessary to prevent a suicide, then an abortion will never occur to prevent a suicide. That is the truth. Some Members are assuming that either doctors will ignore evidence-based medicine deliberately or will be so incredibly incompetent that they will not be familiar with the teachings of evidence-based medicine and with contentious issues.

It is not even possible to say that the Senators who are terribly worried are concerned that perhaps one rogue doctor acting "malfeasantly" could make the decision; they are saying that three rogue doctors acting in collusion will make the decision. These are my colleagues and friends they are talking about. These Members are saying they are fighting to protect women and unborn children from the malfeasance of the woman who comes into lie in the first place to say she is suicidal and from the malfeasance and the incompetence of the three doctors who will collude with her in the wilful destruction of her unborn child for some other reason entirely. There is no short cut around that. That is that they are saying and I do not believe it.

There has been one tragedy in this country where there was a departure from evidence-based medicine because of legal constraints. We are all aware of the case where a sad outcome occurred and a young woman died. There were multiple factors involved and we will not conduct our own mini-inquest here but on the Monday she went into hospital, ambiguity was introduced into the minds of doctors who, if they were thinking only in terms of medicine-based medicine and were not legally constrained, might have made a different medical decision, which was in accordance with evidence-based medicine. That is the decision that somebody was having an inevitable miscarriage. Somebody's precious first baby could not be saved; it was going to die. Under those circumstances one would induce the labour rather than let the woman run the risk of potentially life threatening infection. The ambiguity was there because there is ambiguity in our law. This is not some hypothetical construct; this happened. People need to be aware of all the issues surrounding evidence-based medicine in this circumstance.

I would also appeal for consideration to be given to some of the other amendments, although I know I am going to be ruled out of order on this. We have a situation in this Bill where somebody who rapes a woman will get a shorter life sentence-----