Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) (Amendment) Bill 2022: Report Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2022-11-29
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Erin McGreehan (FF), Nominated by the Taoiseach

I accept an awful lot of what the Minister said at the meeting. I thank him for that time and thank his officials for that meeting. My only concern about all of this is that I am uncomfortable with the language and the term "her pregnancy" because in my opinion, that anonymises the baby, the wee life that is there, by not attaching a life to the pregnancy. One can be pregnant and have an unviable baby. One can have a pregnancy that does not carry through. It is unfortunate that we are moving away from acknowledging a life, particularly after the 12 weeks for which we have legislated. Thankfully, we passed a referendum to allow for that choice. However, by inserting "her pregnancy" and taking out consideration of the unborn, we are anonymising that life. I do not have adequate words, but that is reducing that life to a medical condition and not considering that life.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2022-11-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:20+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-11-29