The Minister for Europe,
Lucinda Creighton, has said that the Government’s abortion
legislation is “built on 
sand”.
She said that there had been
a range of medical experts who had contacted politicians to express
concern “about the complete inability to make this section work and
their inability to make it work, as practitioners”.
And she appealed directly to
Health Minister James Reilly not to “enshrine flawed logic and
flawed legislation” in Irish law, and to remove the suicide clause
from the Bill.
Her remarks came amid a
marathon session in the Dáil last night as the Government voted to
sit until 5am in an attempt to pass the the Protection of Life During
Pregnancy Bill 2013 overnight.
However, with over 100 more
amendments to deal with, the debate is set to resume today, and
debate on the legislation may extend into Friday.
Ms Creighton rejected the
suggestion that the X case obliged the Government to legislate for
abortion.
She said that while a number
of TDs had been cowed by the party whip, some were “cowering behind
the Supreme court”.
She said that legislators
“function as an organ of the State, an organ which is distinct from
the Supreme Court by virtue of the separation of powers”.
The Supreme Court had not
ordered the Oireachtas to legislate, and had no authority to do so,
she said.
And she quoted former
Supreme Court Justice Hugh O’Flaherty, who said that the weekend
that, because the girl at the centre of the X case had gone on to
have a miscarriage, the court ruling on abortion was obiter dictum,
or not binding.
Ms Creighton said: “Despite
this clarification, the terms of the X case keep being dangled over
us as justification – for some, particularly in my party, the only
justification – for the inclusion of this flawed section in the
legislation, which is not evidence-based and which the majority of
the medical professionals in psychiatric care and indeed in general
practice keep telling us is not workable.”
She added that the Irish
system of government was based on a balance of power in which the
Oireachtas, the Government and the judiciary are “supposed to act
as a check on the power of the others as a kind of corrective
mechanism”.
She said the Oireachtas
committee hearings into the Government’s abortion Bill had done just
this by “identifying the fundamental mistake in the legal logic and
the medical science – one might say the complete absence of medical
science – accepted by the Supreme Court in 1992”.
Ms Creighton said: “By
gathering evidence at the hearings, the Oireachtas has fulfilled its
constitutional role and now has a huge volume of testimony that the
Supreme Court did not have which shows that the judgment in the X
case was incorrect and that it ought to be corrected under the
separation of powers principle and the system of checks and balances.
“The Executive, however,
has not only chosen to ignore this fact but is now seeking to
entrench this decision, which is not binding, by forcing the
Oireachtas to compound the error made by a Supreme Court which did
not hear any medical evidence.
“I find that bizarre, to
say the least.”
She added: “I am deeply
concerned about it and I appeal, as I have done a multitude of times,
to the Minister for Health to listen to the evidence put forward by
medical experts and the psychiatrists the Minister is asking to
administer the flawed section. They say they cannot do it. Please let
us listen to them and please let us not enshrine flawed logic and
flawed legislation on our Statute Book.”
Meanwhile, new figures [1] from
the Department of Health for England and Wales show that just under
4,000 Irish women travelled to the UK last year for abortions.
According to the data, 3,982
women from Ireland underwent abortions in England and Wales in 2012.
Just one of these was under
16, while there were 92 women, or two percent of the total, aged
between 16 and 17 who underwent abortions.
Six percent, 223, of those
who had abortions were aged between 18-19.
Women aged between 20 and 24
accounted for 1,082, or 27pc of all Irish women who had abortions,
while women in the next oldest age cohort, between 25 and 29,
accounted for 964 abortions, or 24pc of the total. Women aged 30-34
accounted for 20pc, or 777, of the total number of Irish abortions.
Forty two percent of the
women, or 1,275 of the total gave Dublin addresses, with this being
far and away the biggest total of any region.
Just under 700, 699, women
from Leinster had abortions, while 710 of the women gave addresses in
Munster, and 376 gave addresses from Connacht or the three Ulster
counties in this jurisdiction.