Seanad debates

Tuesday, 15 November 2022

An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business

 

2:30 pm

Photo of Rónán MullenRónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Déanaim comhbhrón le muintir Vicky Phelan freisin agus le muintir an Dr. Éamon Phoenix – go ndéana Dia trócaire orthu. Rinne an Dr. Phoenix sár-obair mar a luaite.

In response to what my friend, Senator Conway, had to say, I will point out that everybody dies with dignity. The question always is whether people's dignity is respected. Nothing disrespects people's dignity like making them feel as if they are a burden in life. That is one of the single biggest fears people have about euthanasia, assisted suicide, assisted dying or whatever people care to call it. We should move very carefully in that area and not just rush to have another citizens' assembly discussion that seems, whenever these happen, to be designed to bring about a preordained or pre-desired change. The matter I want to raise today is a similar human dignity issue. It was reported last Saturday that the Government plans to make telemedicine abortion, so-called, or telephone-based appointments for abortion, a permanent feature of Ireland's abortion policy. I think this is misguided and that it will have negative consequences. The HSE confirmed in October last year that no report or analysis into the operation of so-called telemedicine or remote consultations had been carried out in Ireland since the policy was introduced in early 2020 in the context of Covid. We were told by the Secretary General of the Department of Health in March 2021 that telemedicine would lapse when the pandemic was over. In 2018, the then Minister for Health, Deputy Simon Harris, said in the context of the abortion legislation that there would absolutely not be abortions by telemedicine in this country. Yet here we are, despite the fact we know from England that over 10,000 women there had to receive hospital treatment following the use of at-home medical abortion pills between April 2020 and September 2021. England has also seen a dramatic spike in the number of ambulance call-outs dealing with the adverse effects of the self-administration of abortion pills.

We also have the safeguarding issues associated with the removal of the need for in-person consultations. When we substitute that for a telephone call, we remove the privacy afforded by a GP’s surgery. There is no way for a doctor to verify that a woman requesting an abortion is actually alone and that she is not being pressured by a partner or third party. We had an alarming report in October describing how an underage girl in this country was locked in a room and forced to ingest abortion pills. This is highly disturbing. It would be terrible to think that the Minister and the Department of Health would be enablers of such abuse by their overly lax attitude to telephone appointments for abortion.

There needs to be a serious discussion about this. I call on the Minister for Health not to recklessly make telemedicine abortion permanent but to immediately instigate a comprehensive investigation into the operation and impact of such abortion appointments in Ireland to date. The very least we could do in this House is to have a serious discussion about something so potentially far-reaching.

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