‘It would be just as easy as buying Smarties, if men could have babies’

IF MEN could have babies, abortion ‘would be as easy as getting Smarties’, Junior Minister John Halligan has told the abortion debate in the Dáil.

Several TDs from both sides spoke passionately during yesterday’s second day of the discussion on the findings of the Committee on the Eighth Amendment.

Mr Halligan said the issue was ‘highly emotive’ and one of ‘human rights’. While the Independent Alliance TD welcomed the recommendations, he said he has ‘concerns on a number of fronts’.

‘The recommendation that abortion be denied after 12 weeks’ gestation in cases of severe foetal impairment is problematic. Many severe foetal abnormalities are not diagnosed until the second trimester of pregnancy,’ he said.

‘The position is similar in cases of rape and incest. It is often the case that a pregnancy is not discovered until beyond 12 weeks of gestation. Women coping with the fact that they have been a victim of a sexual crime should not, if they have become pregnant as a result of that crime, face the added distress of being told to leave the country to gain access to abortion.’

He added: ‘If men could become pregnant, abortion would be as easy as getting Smarties or becoming infected by food poisoning.’

Fine Gael’s Kate O’Connell referred to some of the religious imagery sent to members of the committee, stating: ‘They call us child abusers, murderers, handmaidens of the devil; their creativity at crafting insults knows no bounds.’ She asked why a woman must ‘suffer, be violated and terrorised before people feel compassion for them’.

Sinn Féin health spokesperson Louise O’Reilly, who also sat on the committee, said we can no longer say Irish women do not have abortions.

‘They do, but they just do not have them here,’ she said. ‘They also take abortion pills and while the pills are safe it is not ideal that they are sometimes taken without medical supervision.’

Fine Gael’s John Paul Phelan said: ‘I have no problem placing a choice in the hands of parents who are carrying a child that will not live. They should have the opportunity to exercise a choice that they would rather not have to make.

‘Equally, as a legislator, I cannot support any legislation, inside or outside the House, that would see the purposeful destruction of a viable pregnancy.’

Independent TD Danny HealyRae shared a belief similar to that of his brother Michael. He said he does not agree with the recommendations, and that he believes ‘God alone decides when we come into this world and depart it’.

He said: ‘Right around the country, everyone is talking and can articulate his or her view. However, the small baby who has begun its journey into this world cannot express a view, say a word or be asked to be let live.’

Meanwhile, the Fine Gael senator who chaired the committee, Catherine Noone, has said separately that Health Minister Simon Harris’s opening speech in the two-day Oireachtas debate on Wednesday had shown ‘extraordinary strength and bravery’.

She told RTÉ Radio 1’s Today With Seán O’Rourke programme, in discussion with Maria Steen of the Iona Institute, that she hopes to become a mother herself and that she is ‘not pro-abortion’.

She said that she doesn’t ‘think many people are’.

‘The added distress of having to leave’