It is strange that we have to read between the lines to learn what the news actually is.
Despite the so-called decision made by the Government on 18th December 2012 to
bring in abortion legislation based on the X case ruling, the news reports seem
to suggest that the two Parties are not working together on it and do not even
know what each other’s views on it are.
The abortion legislation is turning into a Titanic facing an increasingly dodgy maiden voyage.
But while Labour and Fine Gael continue their carefully choreographed dance of disagreement about the arrangement of the numbers on the abortion panels on the deck of the Titanic, the iceberg of the evidence presented by the psychiatrists at the Oireachtas Hearings held by this Government lies in wait for them, made all the more dangerous by their shared refusal to look at any more than the tip of it.
But there is it, in reality – the real problem with abortion panels is that abortion is not a psychiatric treatment for suicidality. That is why the proposed legislation has to be dropped. Bad medicine makes bad law.
Shilly-shallying about how many should decide a nonsense is a nonsense squared. No panel is small enough or large enough to turn abortion into a legitimate psychiatric treatment for suicidality.
The problem is that the thinking underpinning the X case ruling was wrong and the Government has to snap out of its denial.
The solution is to face that fact and drop that approach.
Joe McCarroll
