Senior cleric urges Irish society to rethink proposed abortion laws

Msgr Brendan Byrne, the diocesan administrator for the Diocese of Kildare & Leighlin, has appealed “not just to legislators but to all of Irish society” to rethink what is being proposed in the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill.

As framed, he said, it was medically and ethically unsound in relation to the issue of suicide.

Threat of suicide
"The key question is whether intervening in pregnancy arising from the risk or threat of suicide can ever be understood as 'life-saving'. The immediate answer to that question is that there is no expert psychiatric evidence that would support any such claim. No legal, medical, political or media commentary should be allowed to obscure that bare fact."

He said he would suggest that we needed to go deeper into the issue of suicide to fully understand what was at stake with the proposed legislation.

“We can never dismiss the threat of suicide, which must always be treated with compassion. However, for anyone who supports the inclusion of the threat of suicide in this legislation on the grounds that ‘it might save even one [mother’s] life’, please consider honestly the wider implications. Listen to the experts in suicide prevention who are warning that the proposed legislation will undermine their work as it will serve to ‘normalise’ suicide in Irish society.”

Meanwhile, Taoiseach Enda Kenny has refused to comment on the call by a senior Vatican official for Oireachtas members who are Catholics to resign rather than support abortion legislation. Msgr Jacques Suaudeau, scientific director of the Pontifical Academy for Life at the Vatican, said if Catholic TDs "are faithful to your conviction, then you have to get out.

"If a politician is being forced to be a formal co-operator with abortion, you leave the party, you get out," he told the Irish Catholic. Politicians could not just claim they were doing their jobs when voting for abortion, in a similar way to how Nazi officers said they were just following orders.

Act is evil
"If an act is evil and you receive an order to do it then you cannot do it," he said. "Sometimes people forget Nuremberg. You cannot cover yourself with the cover of party discipline."

Mr Kenny said his job was to deal with the Constitution and the laws. “I’m a Catholic and I don’t interfere in the messages from the church,” he said.

“I have set out very clearly what it is we have to do here in terms of our Constitution and the law and that is to provide clarity and decisiveness.”