Greg Daly
Minister for Health Simon Harris Health Minister Simon Harris is telling “overt and blatant lies” about proposed abortion legislation, Save the 8th has said.
Interviewed by the Sunday Times, Mr Harris said under proposed legislation there will not be “unlimited abortion up to birth in cases of life-limiting conditions”.
Adding that the published heads of the bill do not contain the term ‘life-limiting conditions’, the minister claimed: “The legislation also states that, once a pregnancy reaches viability, it will be delivered.”
He was responding to Meath’s Bishop Michael Smith, who had said the Government intended to legislate “for unlimited abortion on demand up to 12 weeks, for unlimited abortion up to 24 weeks on the grounds of mental health, and for unlimited abortion up to birth in cases of life-limiting conditions”.
However, Save the 8th has said the minister’s claims are “completely false”.
“The minister is telling untruths, and the public is increasingly seeing through them,” Save the 8th Campaign Chairwoman Niamh Uí Bhriain said.
“Minister Harris is telling overt and blatant lies about what is in his bill. It does not mandate early delivery anywhere. Nor does it ban late term abortions in cases of fatal foetal anomaly – in fact in Head 5, late term abortions, involving the killing of the unborn child, are made legal on mental health grounds,” she said.
Viability
The ‘General Scheme of a bill to regulate termination of pregnancy’ defines ‘termination of pregnancy as “a medical procedure which is intended to end the life of the foetus” with ‘viability’ defined as “the point in a pregnancy at which, in the reasonable opinion of a medical practitioner, the foetus is capable of sustained survival outside the uterus”, this being generally understood as 24 weeks.
Head 5 of the proposed bill proposes that a single medical practitioner should be empowered to perform an abortion when he or she believes it is “immediately necessary” to ward off an immediate risk of serious harm to a woman’s mental health, while Head 6 proposes that it should be lawful to perform an abortion where two medical practitioners believe there is a condition affecting the foetus that is “likely” to lead to the foetus’ death before or shortly after birth.
Neither head mentions viability or restrictions on late-term abortions.