Carol Nolan advances bill to require fetal pain relief

I am honoured to stand here today with the full support of this bill's 10 co-sponsors and I want to thank them all sincerely for their support with this bill. We are here today to move the Health Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Fetal Pain Relief Bill 2021. It is my understanding that Government have now submitted an amendment to the bill which will deny us the opportunity of the bill being read again. This is profoundly disappointing given that this is such a reasonable bill, but I also want to state here quite strongly that I would hope and it is only reasonable to expect that the issue of pain relief will be discussed as part of the review into abortion services. It is something that cannot be left out and it must form part and I would insist on that. I do want to acknowledge the positive engagement from cross-party TDs and Senators in this House. For that reason and also for the humane reason, I think it is important that this pain relief be discussed as I said in the review into the abortion services. The main objective of this bill is contained in section 3, which if it is accepted would insert a new provision into the Act of 2018 requiring pain relief to be administered to an unborn child where appropriate in the minority of cases to which that section applies. The section also makes clear that it does not require pain relief to be administered in emergency cases where it may not be practicable. I want to emphasise that we bring this bill forward in the spirit of constructive engagement and I hope that colleagues will be open to hearing what we have to say and that they will approach this bill with a view to being guided by the science around fetal pain. And more science has come to light in the past few years and indeed the recent developments that have taken place over the last while. In this regard, I wish to highlight the short report on fetal pain published by the Oireachtas Life and Dignity Group. The report pointed to a major review of the scientific literature on fetal pain that was published in the Influential Journal of Medical Ethics in 2020. In their article, Professor Stuart Derbyshire and Dr John Bachmann say research indicates unborn babies might be able to feel something like pain as early as 13 weeks. The lead author of the review, it might be noted, was Professor Derbyshire, who had previously acted as a consultant to the US's largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. In 2006, he wrote in the British Medical Journal that not talking to women seeking abortions about pain experienced by unborn babies was sound policy based on good evidence that fetuses cannot experience pain. However, on foot of his latest review, he says it is now clear that the 2006 consensus is no longer scientifically tenable. The authors went on to note that given the evidence that the fetus might be able to experience something like pain during later abortions, it seems reasonable that the clinical team and the pregnant woman are encouraged to consider fetal pain relief. The Life and Dignity Group report also highlighted the fact that fetal surgeons who perform operations on unborn babies look upon them as their patients. As a result, pain relief medication is routinely administered as standard medical practice. Indeed, one leading children's hospital in the US performed nearly 1,600 fetal surgeries between 1995 and June 2017. Perinatal medicine now treats unborn babies as young as 18 weeks for dozens of conditions, where every care is taken not to inflict pain or cause distress to the unborn baby. In 2019, in a reply to a parliamentary question from Sir Edward Lee MP, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in the UK, confirmed that unborn babies receiving recently announced innovative spinal surgery will, as a matter of course, receive pain relief during the procedure. What we are seeking here today is for the law in this state to reflect a similar precautionary approach, which is reasonable and humane. We already do so in legislation governing animal welfare. In fact, the law demands that this humane approach be reflected in regulatory guidelines dealing with animal welfare. This is only right and proper. For our part, then, we cannot simply rely on an approach which says it is for medical guidelines and medical guidelines alone to deal with such matters. For while that position can have some merit, it remains on certain important issues a totally artificial legislative construct that we must overcome. We have all kinds of patient-centred legislation that mandates where appropriate how our hospitals and healthcare system should operate. We demand the implementation of certain standards and we make laws to ensure that those standards become a reality. In this light, for us to continue insisting that government must have no hand, act or part in shaping a principled approach to medical guidelines is simply not sustainable. This is particularly true for approaches dealing with pain relief. Abortion, and in particular late-term abortions, are highly emotive issues. We know that they are happening already in this state. We know that doctors who inform them are highly conflicted and sometimes physically traumatised, as the UCC study made very clear. That study was informed by the medical professionals themselves. We must take the lead here, and there is a duty and an onus on us to take the lead, as legislators who are determined to insert a modicum of compassion into what is already a sufficiently traumatising experience. We must not abdicate our responsibility as legislators by continuing to insist that the issue of pain relief for unborn children is none of our business and will never be any of our business. How can we maintain that fiction? How long must we wait until our laws in this area are informed according to the best available evidence and, indeed, the best available signs? As the bill's sponsors, we clearly have very strong views about that. But we want to be clear that this bill will apply in circumstances where the baby has progressed to 20 weeks gestation. In that sense, while the principle of the bill is of critical importance, it must also be very narrow and limited in its terms and its approach and application. We hope that, at the very least, this would warrant widespread cross-party support in enabling the bill to proceed to committee, where the issues can be conscientiously teased out through further analysis. For these reasons, and more besides, I commend this bill to the House. I thank you! You