The Government's proposals to legislate for terminations would give some unborn children less protection than is guaranteed under liberal abortion laws in other countries, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.
In his first public intervention in the abortion debate, Dr Martin has expressed particular concern about one aspect of the Government’s plans to legislate for abortion where there is a threat to the life of the mother because of the threat of suicide.
In a letter to The Irish Times , he says his concern relates to situations where the unborn child is viable at the time a termination is being considered.
He says his anxiety is that it would be permissible for doctors to certify that the medical procedure necessary to avert the risk to the woman’s life consisted of the “termination of her pregnancy”. This could happen in such a manner that would bring an end to the life of the unborn before delivery at a stage when the child would be delivered alive if a different method of termination were used.
The only medical treatment in line with the constitutional protection of such an unborn child would be one in which the child was safely delivered, he said. Reliance on a “destructive abortion” in such a situation would be in patent contrast to the meaning of article 40.3.3 of the Constitution.
He concluded: “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 child less protection than is guaranteed in liberal abortion laws in other countries.”
