Referendum legislation
Ruth Coppinger pressed for swift publication of the abortion referendum legislation and warned against criminalising women. The Taoiseach said the general scheme was already prepared, drafting was underway, and the Minister would meet spokespeople.
I want to raise with the Taoiseach the plans to legislate for the referendum vote that took place at the weekend. Time is of the essence. Is the legislation already written and prepared? People expected that it would be and that we would do all that is possible to get the legislation passed by the end of the summer.
There are two issues I want the Minister to consider before he publishes the legislation. One is that a message must be sent to women that they will not be penalised or criminalised, for example, the five women who will try to take abortion pills today. An instruction needs to be sent to the Health Products Regulatory Authority, HPRA, not to intercept those pills. They are prescribed by a doctor, which is the justification given by the HPRA.
The second issue is the suggestion that women would potentially have to attend a GP twice and pay €300 to access an abortion. I hope that these are wild rumours. This should be no different to any other medical situation where one visit for a consultation and a prescription is all that is required. Having to pay €300 for this procedure will be extremely prohibitive for working women and lower paid women who do not have medical cards. If that was to be the case the women may as well resort to the tele-medicine websites that can provide the service for €90. This would not be in line with what we want to do, which is to regulate and provide the procedure within our own health service. I ask the Minister to dispel the notion of any barriers being put in the way of women with regard to the so-called 72 hour paternalistic "cooling-off period".
Comment on this
The general scheme of the Bill has been prepared and was published in March. There has been a lot of preparatory work done around that general scheme to allow us to draft the legislation quickly. There is not a draft Bill ready yet but a lot of work has been done on the general scheme to allow us to legislate and prepare the legislation quite quickly.
The Minister, Deputy Harris, will meet with the spokespeople tomorrow and will go through some of those other issues. I expect that it will be treated as a normal healthcare service and will fall within the same rules of the General Medical Services Scheme.
With regard to importing medicines online, abortion pills or any other pills, it is not lawful to import prescription medicines online. This is for very good reasons around patient safety.