Minister rejects call for abortion referendum on day of same-sex marriage vote

Opposition calls for a referendum on abortion next spring at the same time as the plebiscite on same-sex marriage have been rejected by Minister for Health Leo Varadkar.

He said that a referendum “shouldn’t be done on foot of a tragedy or a very hard case and it shouldn’t be done on the run-in to a general election”, as candidates might make commitments they regretted.

He was responding in the Dáil during a topical issues debate, when Socialist Party TD Ruth Coppinger and Independents Clare Daly and Mick Wallace called for a referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, in light of the Miss Y case.

‘Violated by this State’

Ms Coppinger said that a “young rape victim who had already been sexually violated, was further violated by this State”. She said the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act had failed its first test and proven completely barbaric.

It was the latest in a long series of the State taking control of women’s bodies and lives. “The thread runs from the Magdalene laundries through the mother-and-baby homes and on to the practice of symphysiotomy,” the Dublin West TD said.

Ms Daly said the case of a young rape victim being refused an early abortion showed that “if a person does not have the money or the means to travel, then she is forced to carry a rapist’s child”. She said this was cruel and degrading treatment.

Mr Wallace pointed to the UN Human Rights Committee’s conclusion characterising the panel system for assessing pregnant women at risk of suicide as “mental torture”.

He said the State took steps to force a rape survivor to continue with her pregnancy against her will and to forcibly hydrate her against her will.

Preparation of report

But the Minister warned against comment on Miss Y’s case until all the facts were available and said it was wrong to jump to conclusions about any individual case. A report was being prepared on what happened, the sequence of events and the links between agencies that dealt with Miss Y.

Mr Varadkar said the problem with the debate on abortion in Ireland “is that it has been dominated by the extremes and it’s framed in the Catholic versus anti-Catholic view of things, rather than what’s right and what’s wrong”.

“I think it would be a really bad idea in 2015 in the run-in to a general election for us to have that kind of debate happening in that milieu. Because we’ve been there before. That’s exactly what happened in 1983,” he said.

“In the run-up to a general election people were put in the position where they made commitments that maybe they shouldn’t have. So let’s not repeat the mistakes of 1983 and have all that again in 2015.”