Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is quite remarkable that the Minister who is bringing about the tragic disrespect for human life encompassed by abortion finds offensive referring to abortion as a situation where a child is not let live. I consider it to be a euphemistic description of what happens in cases of abortion. I have questioned the honesty of the approach taken by the Government and also question whether it is honest of the Minister in talking about this issue to immediately refer to the tragic situation where parents receive a tragic diagnosis of a foetal anomaly or hear that their child will have a life limiting disability.Let us just look briefly at what the Minister is doing here. He is trying to cast odium on the proponents of this amendment by portraying it as unsympathetic to the plight of those people. Here is where the lack of honesty is. The Minister's legislation for abortion comprehends much more than those tragic situations. It includes abortion where there is not a threat to life. Under a section 12 abortion, some of which are surgical, some of those parts would potentially be sought for scientific benefit. It is not honest of the Minister to characterise the amendment as somehow being cavalier about the feelings of families who chose abortion. I wish they had not done so. It is wrong for the Minister to pretend it is somehow wrong, inaccurate or cruel to refer to unborn children as not having been allowed to live. I would have thought the Minister would have a basic modicum of sympathy for unborn children to at least allow them a truthful description of what has happened to them. Whether the Minister ascribes blame to the parents in that situation or not is an entirely different question. The Minister knows that well as Minister for Health. He has much more resources available to him than I do.

I sympathise with people who have abortions, regardless of whether or not they have received a diagnosis of a so-called fatal foetal abnormality or a life-limiting condition, which I prefer to refer to it as. It is not honest to immediately default to those narrow grounds of abortion. I prefer the term life-limiting condition because the medical profession said the term "fatal foetal abnormality" is impossible to define correctly, as the Minister may recall, lest anybody seek to accuse me of lacking respect for people in that situation.

The Minister does a serious injustice to the truth quite apart from the injustice to those who have been aborted or those who have been hurt by their abortion experience when he immediately moves into the political zone of mischaracterising what I am talking about. There are a wide range of potential situations where children's lives will be ended under the Minister's legislation and not only in situations of what the Minister describes as the really wanted pregnancies. Sadly there will be pregnancies where abortion is sought where it is not claimed the child is wanted. We are not getting into the blame game with this amendment because we are not imposing any obligation on the mother or parents of the baby in this situation. The Minister needs to get honest and get back to what this amendment is about. It is about showing respect for the dead where the death occurs as the result of a surgical abortion. It is about the responsibility that the amendment would place not on the women involved but on the hospitals that have the resources and ability to see that some kind of dignified arrangement takes place. The Minister cannot keep defaulting to emotive language to try to airbrush away the relevance of these amendments. It does a serious disservice and injustice to everybody involved.