Three times as many of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party are campaigning for a No vote than a Yes vote in the forthcoming referendum on the Eighth Amendment. At least 35 Fianna Fáil TDs and Senators have coalesced into a group to campaign to save the pro-life amendment, including deputy leader Dara Calleary and the party’s finance spokesman Michael McGrath. The group is led by Fianna Fáil TD for Waterford Mary Butler. The group held a photocall yesterday with 31 members, including frontbench spokespersons Eamon Ó Cuív, Niamh Smyth, Anne Rabbitte and Margaret Murphy O’Mahony. Another four, TDs John McGuiness, Willie O’Dea, Kevin O’Keeffe and Senator Diarmuid Wilson, sent their apologies. Yesterday’s photocall was in response to a similar photo taken two weeks ago at the same venue attended by a mere 10 members calling for a Yes vote.

Consultant psychiatrist Patricia Casey has said that to suggest abortion is a solution to mental illness “is naïve in the extreme”. Referring to 2010 study headed by Royal College of Psychiatrists in London, she said it found “whether a woman had an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, or gave birth, made no difference to her mental health outcome”.
She said the General Schema of the Government’s proposed abortion legislation was “very vague in relation to psychiatric assessment”. It contained no definition of mental health and under its terms any medical practitioner could decide an abortion was necessary. “That, to me, is a gross deficiency in the Bill,” she said.
It could mean “a single doctor, specialty unspecified, can carry out an immediate termination of pregnancy where he or she is of the reasonable opinion that there is immediate risk of serious harm to the mental health of a woman, and it will be lawful to carry that out up until birth”, she said.
The Bill went “much farther than the politicians are pretending . It is extreme, it is unsupportable, and it is not based on any evidence,” she said.

Save the 8th spokesman John McGuirk has accused the pro-Repeal ‘Together for Yes’ campaign of desperately avoiding mention of abortion and the legislation that would follow upon repeal of the Eighth Amendment. “Posters up around the country saying yes for compassion, yes for care, yes for kittens, yes for puppies, not talking about the issue, not talking about the real facts, what’s in this Bill. They have a case to answer,” he said. “All they have been doing is engaging in platitudes. We think there is room for a real debate. That hasn’t happened yet and we hope that it will,” he said. The Government have already published the general schema of the abortion legislation it would introduce were the Eighth Amendment deleted from the constitution. The heads of the bill provide for unrestricted abortion for the first three months of pregnancy, abortion for serious threat to mental or physical health up to viability, around the sixth month of gestation, and abortion up to birth where the child has a life-limiting condition.

An inquest into a woman who travelled from Ireland to the UK for an abortion and subsequently died as a result of the procedure has not found her death to be due to negligence. The coroner, Dr Sean Cummings, identified an “element of complacency” within the west London clinic, but said he could not return a verdict of neglect as invited because he was not satisfied there had been a gross failure. He did criticise “repeated failures” at the Marie Stopes abortion clinic and said the case was “desperately sad”.
“Her death resulted from the manifestation of a recognised complication of the procedure resulting in sometimes subtle and atypical symptoms and signs which were not appreciated as potentially sinister at the time”.
Ms Chithira died in January 2012 following a late-stage abortion. Ms Chithira suffered a tear to her uterus during the “blind” procedure performed under anaesthetic, as a surgeon struggled to remove the dismembered parts of a 22-week-old foetus from her womb. Afterwards she vomited and complained of feeling unwell to her husband, but was helped into a taxi to a cousin’s home in Slough by staff who had told her she could not stay overnight. Later that night the mother suffered catastrophic internal bleeding of around two litres and died. Dr Adedayo Adedeji, who performed the procedure, and nurses Gemma Pullen and Margaret Miller were charged with manslaughter by gross negligence and a health and safety breach but the case was dropped in 2016.