Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I completely and utterly support this Bill. I commend the Labour Party for bringing it forward, and the INTO for campaigning on it.

There is no question but that we need red-circled time for people who are going through reproductive health issues. I have got up previously and stated that I have done 13 in vitrofertilisations, IVFs. By the time one adds it all up, it is a re-mortgage and we do need the funding that follows that. Before one arrives at that stage and is accepted for IVF, one has to prove that one has tried every other possible thing. That includes getting up, taking temperatures and doing scans to see if one is ovulating. There is a whole heap of things that have to be done to justify sitting there to get the sort of treatment that one requires. We need to be careful about at what point people come under the cover of being entitled to the provisions of this Bill and making sure that we do not say that there has to be a threshold before which they are sick, are on their own or whatever. That journey to accepting that the terminology of infertility applies to one can be quite long and some of the mental anguish of it can be quite considerable.

While I am on the issue of terminology, what I would see for this Bill, and what is happening in research in bringing something through under the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, is that we confront the terminology. I have sat in consultations and heard terms such as "geriatric mother", "inhospitable womb" and "incompetent cervix". I have sat with others as those terms were used. They are abusive and aggressive terms. I am confident nobody intends them that way but there is no other way to receive them. People in that situation are already questioning their identity, their usefulness, their body, their experience and the things they hoped for from when they were a child - to hold their own baby - when they were playing with a doll. They have all of that, and then have the medical terminology being so unbelievably sexist.

If we start with reproductive leave, I am 100% behind that but we also need to open up a conversation on the equality and treatment and how we as a society, just as the Leader has said, deal with people who are experiencing problems in their reproductive life and in the hopes that they had of that, and just how aggressive and diminishing an experience that can be for the individuals going through it. I would hope that we see that in the course of all of this and that we would also see support in the aftermath. There are couples going through IVF that fails. Even when it is a success, it can be triggered into a post-traumatic stress because it is so all-consuming.

We need a compassionate move as a society. We need an intolerance for all the "what is for you will not pass you" sort of comments where one just wants to shake the person and say, "Seriously, no." Invariably, it comes from people who have found it easy to have children.

We need to aggressively take it on and bring it out into the open. I loved that about out the debate last May and about the ongoing journey. It feels like we are on a trajectory of bringing all of this out into the open, bringing a dignity to what can at times be an undignified experience, but bringing a dignity in our society to cherishing the couples and single people that are going through this journey and that there is a compassion in our society for it.