The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has warned that the Government’s abortion legislation 
will give the unborn child whose mother was deemed to be suicidal “less protection than is guaranteed in liberal abortion laws in other countries”.
In what is Archbishop Martin’s first intervention in the debate over the Government’s proposal, he said that the Bill envisaged the destruction of unborn human life in circumstances not envisaged by the Constitution.
In a letter in today’s Irish Times, he wrote that his concern on this occasion was “limited to one aspect of the Heads of the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill 2013, namely the protection of perfectly healthy unborn children at a stage of their development where there is the clear presumption that they are viable outside the womb”.
He said that the proposal seemed to infer “that in cases where the pregnant woman’s life might be in danger that such a child would lose its constitutional right to equal protection under the law”.
Archbishop Martin said: “My anxiety is that it would be permissible under Head 4 for medical specialists to certify that the ‘medical procedure’ necessary to avert the risk to the mother’s life consists of the ’termination of her pregnancy’, in such a manner that will bring an end to the life of the unborn before delivery at a stage when, if a different method of terminating the pregnancy were used, the child would be delivered alive.”
He added: “It would seem to me that in such a case the only medical treatment which would be in line with the constitutional protection of the life of such an unborn child would be one in which the child be safely delivered and that reliance on a destructive abortion in such a situation would be in patent contrast with the evident meaning of the words of article 40.3.3 of the Constitution.
“There is a growing impression that the judgment of the X case ‘is the constitution’.
“I believe that it is an interpretation given in a specific case which does not supersede or relativise the clear constitutional right to equal protection for unborn life in the circumstances which I have outlined. Indeed under Head 4 it would give the life of such an unborn less protection than is guaranteed in liberal abortion laws in other countries.”
In response, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny said the legislation is about bringing clarity to protection of life of the mother and the requirement to do everything possible and practicable to save the life of the unborn as well.
Mr Kenny said that in any assessment of a person in difficulty with pregnancy there is a requirement to do everything practicable in the sense of saving the unborn and mothers.
Meanwhile, the Oireachtas Health Committee is set to begin hearings on the Government proposal on Friday.
It is set to hear from officials from the Department of Health, from delegates from the representative bodies for the medical profession and from a series of consultant gynaecologists including Dr Peter Boylan from the National Maternity Hospital and Dr John Monaghan from Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe.