There’s been some furore on social media about a recent bill on abortion that was just defeated in the Dail, with people going back and forth on what exactly the bill does, and what exactly voting for it did or didn’t mean. So to clear up some confusion we wanted to provide a short explainer of the bill and the motion that was voted on this week.

The text of the bill itself is online, and it’s extremely short:

Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Amendment Bill 2023

The actual substance of the legislation is contained in six short sections on page 3 and the start of page 4. The first and sixth of these are about establishing the title of the bill itself and the short form of that title respectively, so the bill only really does five things (two of them in one section).

The things the bill would have done if enacted as written were:

* Remove all criminal penalties from legislation for medical practitioners and people other than the woman herself performing or otherwise facilitating abortions. (Existing legislation already protects women from criminal prosecution related to the termination of their own pregnancy). (Section 5 of the bill)

* In terms of the remaining regulations, the bill would leave most of the structure of the 2018 legislation in place (though no longer criminally enforceable) but with the following changes:

  • Remove the current three day waiting period between a woman originally requesting an abortion and the abortion taking place (Section 4a)
  • Change the rules about abortion for children with terminal conditions or “fatal foetal abnormalities” so that they can be aborted if they are likely to die with a year of birth rather than within 28 days of birth (Section 3)
  • Changing the period in which an abortion can be had at the request of the woman from 12 weeks to “up to viability”, currently defined in Ireland as 23 weeks (Section 4a)
  • Changing the way the ‘life and health’ ground for abortion works to allow abortions under this ground up to birth rather than up to viability, other than in cases of emergency, in which current legislation already allows abortion at any stage (Section 2 of the bill)

As there would no longer be any criminal penalties for performing or facilitating an abortion outside of the circumstances specified by the legislation (for example, an abortion at 38 weeks at the request of the woman without any threat to her life, health, or the life of the child), any restriction on such abortions would only be enforced by other means, such as Medical council guidelines that came with non-criminal sanctions.

The motion being voted on this week was a motion to restore the bill as written to the Dail’s agenda so it could proceed to committee stage. The bill as written had already passed second stage, but all bills under consideration by the Dail “fall” after a general election and need to be voted on again to get back to where they were before. A bill can receive further amendments at committee stage, but voting to progress the bill here would only make sense if a TD was supportive of at least most of its content. We agree with Paul Murphy TD, one of the Bill’s strongest supporters, that there is something strange about characterizing a vote for the motion as a purely procedural matter that expresses no opinion on the merits of the legislation.

As the motion to restore the bill has now failed, the bill would need to go through first and second stage again to get back to where it was before – effectively, it would have to start again as a new bill and progress through the whole legislative process.

As should be pretty obvious from a straightforward description of it, this was a very bad bill, and its defeat is unambiguously good news for human rights. It’s important not to overstate the scale of the victory here: current abortion legislation in Ireland permits the vast majority of abortions, and “let’s stop things where they are now” would be a truly awful permanent settlement for abortion in Ireland. Abortion numbers have roughly doubled since repeal and thousands of people are dying each year.

The need to change minds on the actual substance of the issue remains as urgent as ever.

But this bill, if passed, would certainly have made things worse and led to more deaths. Every change that the bill would have made would have been bad. In particular, the three-day waiting period is saving a lot of lives by giving women a chance to reflect on what they are really choosing, and deleting it would have been (as we’ve argued before) completely unjustifiable even from a moderate pro-choice point of view.

Decriminalising abortion would weaken the force of all the remaining restrictions the legislation left in place. It would also remove the legal basis that only weeks ago was used to prosecute a case of forced abortion. The Irish Times reports:

A man in his 20s has admitted to causing the unlawful termination of a woman’s pregnancy.

He admitted he assaulted the complainant and forced her to take tablets that caused the abortion of her nine-week-old foetus. The charges relate to a date in 2020 at a location in Co Donegal, and his conviction is believed to be one of the first of its kind in the State.

He pleaded guilty to a charge of unlawfully ending the life of a foetus contrary to section 23.2 of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018. The charge relates to administering, supplying or procuring any drug, substance, instrument, apparatus or other thing knowing that it was intended to be used or employed with intent to end the life of a foetus, or being reckless as to whether it was intended to be so used or employed.


We hope the rejection of this bill will be an occasion for both legislators and citizens to think about why it was rejected. Why was this bill ‘too extreme’? If it was, isn’t our current legislation almost as bad? Leaving aside legislation, what about the ethics of this? Does the fetus count as one of us, as our equal? What would that mean if it was true? Do bodily rights mean that people have a right to kill our moral equals? Debates about these questions are not over, and they never will be until the human rights of every human being are recognised.

Ben