Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Those Members of the House who are opposed to the referendum are not antidemocratic if they vote against having a referendum. I ask the House to remember in particular those who I believe wrongly said they would allow the Bill to abolish the House to go through but only so that the people could have their say on the matter. That is not the process. The Constitution remains the same until the Oireachtas proposes a change to the people. If one is opposed to a change, one is entitled to vote against a change.

Others have spoken extremely eloquently about dilemma of girls and women who find themselves having to make a decision about whether to procure a termination of their pregnancies. I want to emphasise one thing. As we heard today, sometimes people do not look at the Constitution. If one looks at the Constitution carefully, one will find Article 40 concerns personal rights. The issue is not whether a fertilised ovum in a petri dish in an in vitrofertilisation clinic is human life. In one sense it is, in the same sense that an acorn is tree life in one sense. An acorn is not a tree.

Likewise, a fertilised ovum is not a human person from most people's point of view. It is the means whereby a person could, after a pregnancy, come into existence. The reason I mention that is because we are dealing with personal rights. I believe the mistake which was made and the error against which Peter Sutherland counselled in 1983 was to create an absolute black and white description of the distinction between potential life and a human person in circumstances where, as the Leader has said, there is a grey area.

I believe very strongly that once the possibility of pharmaceutical termination of pregnancy came about, a totally different situation was created.The State cannot, in fact, prevent it and cannot realistically put people on trial for getting such a tablet online or administering it to themselves. We have to face the truth of what Article 40.3.3o has done to us. In the X case a victim of a rape was told by the Supreme Court that, according to the article, as it stood originally, she could be restrained by an injunction from travelling out of the State to have an abortion in Britain and that only the fact that she was suicidal overrode it. That was what the X case was about. My good friend, the late Adrian Hardiman, who was a barrister at the time said on television that travel injunctions would follow from the eighth amendment if it became law. He was told by a leading academic whom I will not mention now but Members can all guess who it was-----