The rights of the unborn child in Ireland are now "very vulnerable", the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, has said in a trenchant criticism of the High Court decision in the C case.
He called on the Government to move swiftly "to give our people a chance to reaffirm the right of all human beings to live" and said he was praying that the Eastern Health Board would resolve the situation in a "better way than that proposed".
Dr Connell said he had hoped the court's decision would be a life-affirming one "which would cherish the welfare of each of the children involved, one 13 years old, the other 13 weeks in the womb".
In an article in today's Irish Independent, he said he had many concerns about the decision, and "obviously, of first concern to all of us must be the impact of abortion".
"For the baby, it is fatal; for the mother, it can cause long-term psychiatric and emotional problems; for the family in this case, deep grief must ensue. For our society, a deadening of our moral sense and of our sense of justice to each other cannot but follow when we sanction the death of the innocent."
He had deep reservations about the reaffirmation by the courts "of the notion that there are circumstances where abortion is medically justifiable. The testimony in the X case, relating to suicidal cases, was already controversial."
Dr Connell also said the High Court's decision to sanction the refusal by the Children's Court to admit an alternative psychiatric assessment of the girl was incomprehensible to him "given that somebody's life was at stake".
The fact that many well-meaning people differed about pregnancies in such tragic circumstances could not prevent us from looking at the "medical realities", he added. Four points were critically important:
- the Medical Council had not accepted the necessity for abortion;
- our standard of medical care to pregnant mothers ranked with the best in the world and was "superior to that in abortion jurisdictions near us";
- the vast majority of Irish doctors were opposed to abortion;
- and, most importantly, at a psychiatric level, abortion would appear to cause more problems than it solved, even were the issue to be judged on its medical implications alone.