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DUBLIN, July 11, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – After a tense all-night debate in the Irish parliament, legislators have postponed the vote that was expected to have passed the government’s abortion bill on to the Senate on Wednesday. In what is likely the Prime Minister’s first concession to legislators’ concerns, Enda Kenny agreed at about five am to allow more time to debate the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill. The vote, originally scheduled for Wednesday night, is expected late this afternoon. The bill proposes to legalize abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy for women who claim to be suicidal.

Kenny has refused to allow his Fine Gael TDs a conscience vote on a bill that is reportedly tearing apart the coalition government. Four TDs who refused to vote for the bill at first reading were summarily expelled from the party the following morning.

“The rules of the Fine Gael party are not set by me,” Kenny said. “They are set by the supporters of the party at the Ard Fheis [annual conference] and those rules are very clear and everybody understands them.” Kenny continues to insist that the bill does nothing more than “clarify” the legal situation.

Pro-life campaigners and politicians have told the government in committee hearings that it was legalizing “limited abortion” that has created virtual or actual abortion-on-demand in Britain, the US and most other countries of the western world. Medical experts nearly unanimously told the government hearings that abortion is never a legitimate treatment for suicidal ideation. Indeed, they said, abortion tends to exacerbate feelings of hopelessness and despair that lead to suicide. Many of the expert witnesses denounced the effort to legalize abortion on suicide grounds as a transparently political ploy pushed by the international abortion lobby.

Moreover, a US expert has pointed out that the legislation is founded on the same inaccurate medical and scientific definitions that have caused confusion in law courts around the world. It starts with the statement that pregnancy, and therefore legal protection under the constitution, starts only at implantation, not the creation of the embryo at fertilization, a re-definition first sponsored by abortion lobbyists in the US that has been denounced for decades by doctors.

At the same time, the bill’s supporters in the Dáil have said that the “limited” abortion regime it will bring to Ireland is only the beginning. Pro-abortion TDs were recorded saying that once the wedge is in the door, abortion-on-demand is the ultimate goal.

Aodhan O’Riordain, a TD with the openly abortion-campaigning Labour Party, called the current bill “a starting point”. “Once you get that,” he said, “then you can move.”

“Of course if I’m on the radio and somebody says to me, ‘It’s a starting point for abortion on demand,’ I’m gonna say, ‘No, of course it isn’t – it is what it is.’”

Wicklow TD Anne Ferris, also with Labour, said, “We will legislate certainly for what the European Court has told us to and then we can go further than that . . . we get the first part done and then we will go on to the next bit.”

“People aren’t going to vote Fianna Fail back into power again, so I would say then next term it will happen,” Ferris added.

Despite all this, the Independent notes that the bill is “likely to pass comfortably with a large majority of the vote.”

Currently Irish law allows for pre-term inducement of labour in cases where the mother’s life is directly threatened, but never allows the direct, intentional killing of an unborn child. The pro-life article of the Irish Constitution, established by a referendum in 1983, says, “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.” It requires that doctors give equal consideration to the life of the unborn child with the life of the mother and do everything possible to save both in a crisis.

The new legislation, however, would fundamentally change that legal situation, allowing doctors to directly kill the unborn child at the mother’s request if she says she feels suicidal.

In an impassioned speech to the Dáil on July 1st , Fine Gael’s Minister of State for European Affairs, Lucinda Creighton, said that she had “never imagined” when she ran for office that she would be forced to speak against a government proposal to legalize abortion. She is widely expected to be the fifth TD expelled from the party for refusing to support the bill.

“I am in no doubt by now,” she said, “that this legislation will pass, notwithstanding the many reservations expressed privately and publicly by colleagues from all parties – indeed, in the face of the grave reservations expressed by expert psychiatrists in two separate sessions of Oireachtas health committee hearings.”

She said she had a “very different view” as a student, but “after much reflection,” and as she “matured,” developed her own opinion.

“Crucially, I stepped out of the groupthink which I genuinely believe dominates this debate in Ireland.”

Creighton called for the suicide clause to be removed from the bill, and alternative therapies to be offered to women with severe depression.

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Prime Minister Enda Kenny
Department of the Taoiseach
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Fax: + (0)1-6764048
Email: [email protected]

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