Other options than ‘flawed’ X case

Those who want legislation based on the X case often suggest that, in the difficult situation where a pregnant mother expresses suicidal thoughts, there are two options.

These are to take the child’s life to save the mother’s life, or to allow the mother to die. The Oireachtas hearings importantly made it very clear that these are not the only two options. Patricia Casey described the psychiatric care that she and others give mothers in these very difficult situations. Anthony McCarthy testified that in many years as a perinatal psychiatrist caring for many suicidal pregnant women, it had never been the case that “the appropriate treatment for their suicidal feelings would have been a termination of pregnancy”.

The Government proposes to legalise abortion in cases of suicide risk, based on a flawed Supreme Court judgment and, supposedly, to try to avoid one harmful outcome, maternal suicide. Legal abortion is not even an appropriate way to avoid this, and will instead cause even greater harm — the unnecessary deaths of at least a few, and likely, many more innocent unborn children.