A senior consultant obstetrician who favours an outright constitutional ban on abortion urged the committee "to be very slow in tampering with the law".
The judgments in the X and C cases had effectively "put the kibosh" on things, said Dr P.J.K. Conway, who cited statistics to show that only two maternal deaths had been recorded out of the 223,000 births delivered in the three Dublin maternity hospitals between 1980 and 1989.
One of the deaths was of a woman suffering from depression who died from an overdose, said Dr Conway. But she had been attending a psychiatrist beforehand and had taken her own life some time after her pregnancy had ended.
Yet despite statistics such as this, "the judges decided that two young women were going to commit suicide", he said. Both the X and C cases involved minors who were pregnant following sexual assault, and each case was determined on the basis of risk to the life of the mother.
The figures showed that Ireland was the safest place in the world for a mother to have a baby, he said. An average annual death rate of 1.7 cases per 10,000 was recorded among women in the tertiary maternity hospitals between 1980 and 1989 "from all cases, including those unrelated to pregnancy". That figure had improved to 0.8 per 10,000 cases on average between the years 1990 and 1998.
"Who needs abortion to save a mother's life?" Dr Conway asked. "Public health progress and medical progress will reduce maternal mortality further."
Dr Eamon O'Dwyer, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynaecology at NUI Galway, said a constitutional referendum on abortion should be held to "roll back" the Supreme Court decision in the X case.
"It cannot be done by legislation . . . If a wording can be given which will protect the woman's right to everything she is entitled to, then I think we could have done something worthwhile," he said.
Dr O'Dwyer said the constitutional amendment should state explicitly that no woman would be put at risk. "I have very strong views about women being denied treatment in pregnancy. Not only is it unethical, but it is reprehensible to withhold treatment from a pregnant woman because you might damage her baby, unless she demands herself that no treatment be given."
Dr O'Dwyer said that, when he spoke about abortion, he meant the deliberate intentional destruction of the child in the womb. "If I treat somebody, and the baby dies, it is unfortunate, but it happened."
He had practised as an obstetrician for over 40 years, looking after more than 9,000 women. "Not one of those 9,000 women died, and I never had reason to think that I could have done better if I had abortion," he said.
