A senior clinical psychologist with the Eastern Health Board, Mr Fred Lowe, has called for legislation to allow rape victims the legal option of abortion.
Opposing another constitutional referendum, he said: "Another abortion debate, with threatening confrontations between pro-choice hordes waving banners and pro-life mobs waving plastic foetuses, will produce only more meaningless hatred.
"Every form of words will be inadequate for some case at some time. We need the courage to admit this fact, and remove the matter from the Constitution altogether. We can then see each case as an individual woman's personal dilemma. The Constitution has no right to intrude into private tragedy."
Mr Lowe, who said he was speaking as an individual, thought that legislation was the best means of dealing with the issue. It was more easily changed for circumstances. "Legislation, I think, can take better account of the special social circumstances of rape victims. I would go down the road of having good strong legislation so that all of the social dimensions can be looked at."
In his submission to the Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution's abortion hearings, Mr Lowe said there was no simple solution to the abortion problem because it was a clash between two rights: the right of the mother not have something invade her body against her will and the right of a foetus to be protected.
"When the foetus has got there by force, as in cases of rape, or by deception, as when a man cuts the top off his condom, or claims he has had a vasectomy, the woman should have the right to refuse to carry the foetus. To force the woman to relinquish control over her body is to deprive her of a basic human right, the right to own and control what happens to her body.
"The crime of rape exists because someone has taken away that right, and the law to force the rape victim to endure the effects of rape, by making her give birth to the rapist's child, is to make her the victim of a kind of secondary rape, which should perhaps be called `State rape'. It is an odd Constitution indeed that upholds the right of a rapist to force a woman to have his child. It is time it was changed."
Mr Lowe said that Roman Catholic dogma said life began when the sperm entered the egg and when the egg began to divide. That moment, according to the church, was the miracle of life, created by God, and should not be interfered with, either by contraception or abortion, he added. "To maintain this belief, the church has to ignore all sorts of facts that make nonsense of dogma. For example, about 25 per cent of all fertilised eggs miscarry, usually without the woman being aware that she has had a miscarriage.
"These millions of miscarriages are not seen as `lost babies', either by the State or the church. Only miscarriages after the foetus is deemed capable of independent life have to be recorded as births or deaths. Foetuses miscarried early in pregnancy, before 24 weeks or before the foetus weighs 500 grammes, do not have to be registered as having lived, nor do they have to be christened, or given a formal burial.
"They are non-beings, not deemed legally to have become a citizen. The church's burial practices accept this fact. However, the church then ignores this embarrassing detail so that it can preserve its dogma that God creates a life in body and in soul at conception. The church may refuse to christen and bury a foetus, but it none the less insists the unborn foetus has a constitutional right to exist inside the mother against her will."
Mr Lowe said he was talking about coercion, the removal of choice from a woman, and not about whether the woman should have the choice to have an abortion.
Asked by Mr Jim O'Keeffe TD (FG) if he had given evidence in the X case relating to suicide, Mr Lowe confirmed that he had been a witness, but he would not discuss the matter. "My submission has nothing to do about suicide. It is about the woman's right to choose not to have an enforced pregnancy."
He told the committee chairman, Mr Brian Lenihan TD (FF), that he would include statutory rape under the same heading as rape. "To broaden it out into a discussion about suicide is irrelevant. This is about the right to choose." Mr Lenihan asked Mr Lowe to comment on the view, expressed on the ethical side, that it was wrong to compound the wrong done to the woman by inflicting a wrong on an unborn person.
Mr Lowe said in Kosovo hundreds of women who had been made pregnant by Serbs had babies. "The fates of those babies were horrifying. Many were left out to die, many were dumped in institutions, and we can see from that the extremely disturbing effects of an unwanted pregnancy where it is the result of coercion and rape."
