Labour has expressed surprise at Prof Anthony Clare's comments this week on abortion, saying they appear to conflict with his evidence to the All-Party Committee on the Constitution.
Prof Clare and Prof Patricia Casey said that "no evidence can be found unequivocally linking suicide to the refusal of an abortion". Saying they support the Government's proposed amendment to rule out the risk of suicide as a ground for abortion, they said abortion was not "a psychiatric matter".
Labour's health spokeswoman, Ms Liz McManus, pointed out yesterday that in May 2000 at the hearings of the All-Party Committee on the Constitution Prof Clare said, " . . . so that suicide as a consequence of termination being refused is a low risk but it's not an absolutely non-existent risk. It can and has happened."
Ms McManus went on: "If Prof Clare acknowledges the fact that, in a rare number of cases, the refusal of a termination can result in suicide, how can he then claim that psychiatric considerations have no role in the abortion debate? Indeed, as the Royal College of Psychiatrists recently pointed out in a letter to the Taoiseach, while there were 'no absolute psychiatric indications for termination of pregnancy' this does not mean that there is 'no psychiatric justification for abortion'."
The Royal College emphasised that such decisions had to be on a case-by-case basis. "The letter was prompted by concerns of the Irish division of the Royal College that their views on this issue being misrepresented by the Government in its Green Paper on abortion." She welcomed the fact that Prof Clare and Prof Casey had made "their political position" on this referendum known, stating they support the Government's proposal.
But she said other psychiatrists had different views, and Prof Clare and Prof Casey "do not have a monopoly of professional wisdom in this area. There are a number of practitioners who would strongly dispute their claims." In the C case, she said, "a judge was satisfied that the psychiatric evidence given by a leading child psychiatrist, Dr Gerard Byrne, was conclusive and was grounds for a 13-year-old girl, who had been brutally raped, to have a termination of pregnancy to save her life."