Colette Kelleher (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support the passing of the Thirty-sixth Amendment of the Constitution Bill 2018 and hope my colleagues will too. I support the Bill because 35 years after the eighth amendment was inserted into the Constitution it is time to reflect on its impact, consequences and morality. It has not stopped an Irish woman from having an abortion. It has just stopped a woman we know and a woman we do not know from having a legal abortion in Ireland. There is a saying where I come from, urging caution in casual conversation, "you wouldn't know where you are talking." It usually involves being careful and discreet in case we unwittingly speak ill of someone's cousin or friend, Ireland being such a small, connected place. With abortion in Ireland, we definitely do not know where we are talking. With all of the secrecy and shame, we will never know that we are talking about the very private, tough decision of a woman we might meet every day, who is listening to us all again tonight, on the radio or television. She has to listen to us again because access to abortion care in Ireland remains a lonely, unsettled matter that needs public support to be settled once and for all.

For a few years in the late 80s my friends, Senator Ivana Bacik and I were part of the Irish Women's Abortion Support Group. It was a group of very ordinary, middle of the road, mainstream women who were offering the hand of friendship to other very ordinary, middle of the road, mainstream Irish women who had decided that they needed to have an abortion. The first woman to stay with me and my husband was in her forties and expecting her seventh child. She had travelled from Finglas in Dublin. She was a massgoer and, as it happens, a parishioner of Fr. Michael Cleary. It was in 1989 when unemployment was rampant in Ireland and her husband had just been laid off. She decided that she just could not have another child and had come to England by boat for an abortion. I met her at Euston train station. Our group helped her out with a bit of money. She had never been out of Ireland, let alone to London. She came back to my flat where she had a bit of food with us and slept on a rigged up camper bed. The next day I went with her to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, BPAS, on Charlotte Street the following day to the clinic in Richmond. The day after that I met her again and put her on the boat train back to her six children and husband in Dublin.

I also remember a young couple who stayed with us. They had arrived off the Slattery's bus in Victoria. They were scared. They were both still in college and not ready to start a family. Apart from one other, no one knew that the young woman was pregnant. My husband and I were the first people to whom they felt free to talk. A burst condom had been the cause of the very unplanned pregnancy, which was not uncommon. It does happen. The young woman's uncle was a bishop. She and her boyfriend were petrified that it would be found out. It was not good enough that the struggling mother of six had to travel to England in 1989 or that the young woman who was so terrified of a crisis pregnancy or, worse, discovery and judgment by her uncle, the Bishop had to do the same. It was not good enough 30 years ago and it is not good enough that this very day ten women are travelling for an abortion or that women we may or may not know are taking strong medication without medical care. We need the Bill to pass and ask people who are not extreme, hardline, harsh or unkind to repeal the eighth amendment to the Constitution. It is past time to question the morality and the sway of those who oppose abortion for any woman, in any circumstance, in any country, anytime.

People of undoubted conviction, good, upstanding people, would nonetheless because of their strongly held, unswerving beliefs force a girl, a victim of incest, a woman who has been raped and a woman who is expecting a child with a fatal foetal anomaly to take the pregnancy to full term. There are people of conviction who, up to the early 1990s, tried to stop a woman from travelling or even receiving information on abortion. The right to travel and the right to access information were only rectified in another referendum on abortion held in 1992. They opposed tooth and nail the modest changes made in the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013. They picket clinics. When I was in London recently, I heard that this had been going on in Brentford in west London until kind people in the community took out an injunction against the protesters.It is tough for a woman to travel from Ireland to face a mob outside a clinic shouting at, hassling and judging her. There are people of conviction who kill doctors involved in the provision of abortion care in the United States. There are people of conviction who would keep the eighth amendment, in spite of the fact that doctors - obstetricians such as Peter Boylan and his colleagues - tell us that it compromises them and creates a chill factor which prevents them from providing the full range of health care services that they, as doctors, recommend. There are people of conviction who are content that doctors face 14 years in jail for doing so. There are people of conviction who claim to love women, but they do not. Their conviction leads them to being very hardline, harsh and unkind. They ignore the messiness of real lives and do not listen. It is extreme, hardline, harsh and unkind to deny a woman who has been raped abortion care services close to home. It is extreme to deny a girl who has been the victim of incest abortion care services close to home. It is extreme to deny a woman who is carrying a child with a fatal foetal anomaly abortion care services close to home. It is extreme to deny medical supervision to a woman who is taking strong medication and make her a criminal. Keeping the eight amendment is extreme, hardline and harsh. It is very controlling, judgmental and dangerous for women's health. We can occupy a kinder middle ground than occupying such an extreme, hardline, harsh, cold and unkind place. We can start by voting for the Thirty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution Bill and then in May joining together as kind, decent, realistic Irish people to vote "Yes" to repeal the eighth amendment. We can publicly support a woman in the decisions she makes with her doctor, safely, privately and decently.

Repealing the eighth amendment would give us a chance to change Ireland for the better. The roadmap for that change is the report the Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution gave us and what the Minister outlined to us earlier this evening. I infamously said when I last spoke on this matter that I had waited 35 years to speak. In 35 years' time, if I am still alive, I will be 91 years old when I hope things will be better on a lot of fronts. I wish the Minister of Health was present. At that time I hope I will be living at home with a decent home care service and decent safeguarding legislation in place. I hope a woman in Cork or anywhere else in the country will not have to wait for access to gynaecological services. I hope a child born with a disability will have all of the supports he or she will need and that we will have good early years child care and education services in every community. I hope every child will have a home in which to grow up, not a hub or a hostel. I hope any child or young person with mental health issues will have all of the love and support they need. I hope every child and young person will be thoroughly educated about their bodies, relationships and having safe and healthy sex. I hope every woman and girl will have access to the very best health care, maternity care and breast care services and vaccinations to prevent cancer, with the best menopausal care services, in which I have a vested interest. I hope there will be free contraception and abortion care services as a normal and standard part of that process.

Let us hold the referendum, vote "Yes" and put the matter to rest. Let us spare women the trauma of having to travel and the threats to their health as a result of taking medication unsupervised. Let us avoid the retraumatisation of women as a result of our decisions and turning a blind eye. We should not allow ourselves to be browbeaten by extreme views that make a woman relive tough decisions she made a long time ago over and over again. Let us move on.