Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

-----and the great work he has done. It was moving to watch him, the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Zappone, and the Taoiseach standing together on an evening in January and announcing that a referendum would be held this year. I commend him on that and for at last facing what is the stark reality of so many women's lives in Ireland.

I am proud to stand here as a Labour Party representative. The Labour Party will of course support the Bill. We are a party that is united behind the recommendations of the Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. I commend Senator Noone on her considerable work in chairing that committee. I commend all members of that committee, in particular our representative, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan. We are united in our support for the proposals on legislation and repeal of the eighth amendment.

I am just about under 50 years of age. I was too young to have voted in 1983, but I have lived all of my adult life under the chill of the eighth amendment. I cannot believe that I now have two young daughters growing up under the same chill. I do not want them to reach adulthood with the same constraints and facing the same sort of restrictions on their reproductive health care that so many have faced for so long. I felt that chill personally as a students' union officer when we were taken to court by the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, SPUC, in 1989 and threatened with prison for giving the phone numbers of clinics in Britain to women with crisis pregnancies. I will never forget the desperation in the voices of the women who phoned us, and in the faces of the women who called into our students' union office in Trinity, seeking that information, which was not then accessible to them anywhere else. SPUC had closed down women's counselling centres under the eighth amendment in a series of often forgotten cases on information rights. We were subjected as students to vitriol, hate mail and horrible abuse at a time when the debate was extremely polarised and unpleasant. I hope that, this time around, we will see a difference in debate. Senator Reilly referred rightly to nasty language used in the Seanad Chamber during the debate on the 2013 Bill, but I hope that it will be different this time, as I believe it has been so far.

I never regretted the stance that we took as students, even though it was difficult as a 21 year old. Subsequently, I worked in London with the Irish Women's Abortion Support Group as a volunteer. We provided accommodation to Irish women coming to London for terminations of pregnancy. I met many women in difficult personal circumstances for whom pregnancy was a crisis, one compounded by having to travel, stay with strangers and raise money for their terminations in a foreign clinic. I think of women like that all the time. As the Minister stated, ten women are still travelling every day. I cannot believe that we are decades on and still in that position. From last year's figures from the British Department of Health and Social Care, we know about the cases of 3,265 women. We know that 1,700 or 1,800 women per year are importing pills to Ireland. As such, approximately 5,000 women from Ireland are having terminations of pregnancy every year. We know that more than 160,000 women have done so since 1983.

These are not just figures. These are women in each of whose cases there was a terrible crisis in her pregnancy, one that was compounded by having to travel. The eighth amendment has not prevented abortion. It has simply compounded the crisis. It has created a series of tragic cases, which some Senators have outlined. Others have spoken of the death of Savita Halappanavar in October 2012, which changed people's opinions. For example, many medical people realised the true extent of the chilling effect that the eighth amendment was having on medical practice. As Senator Ned O'Sullivan pointed out, the Act that we subsequently passed to provide for the circumstances of life-saving terminations of pregnancy did not open the floodgates. There have been only 25 or 26 terminations per year since then, with 77 in total, to save women's lives.

Since the Act's passing, we have seen further tragic cases. In particular, the PP case in 2014 was horrific. A young woman with two small children was artificially kept alive-----