I am immensely proud to have played an active part in campaigning to repeal the eighth amendment. I had so many people share their very private and personal experiences with me on the doorsteps in Drogheda and the wider parts of my county. Activists of all political hues joined together under the banner of Together For Yes. We asked voters to trust women and we asked them to support providing compassionate care at home. We met daughters, mothers, sisters and grandmothers from all walks of life who had their own harrowing experiences of being forced to travel, forced to borrow money and, crucially, being forced to wait to access terminations. In my home county of Louth, 66.5% of voters said "Yes" to repealing the eighth amendment. At a time when we watched women's rights and autonomy being eroded in other parts of the world, activists young and old took pride in playing their part in reclaiming their bodies and rights here at home. Now, more than six years on, we know that forcing women to wait for a mandatory three-day period is having a negative impact and that it is a barrier to accessing the same compassionate care people voted for. To the best of my knowledge, a three-day waiting period enshrined in law does not apply to any other medical procedure, yet here we are this evening debating the removal of a mandatory wait that is applied to women's healthcare. The waiting period does not provide care. It leaves women exposed, isolated and vulnerable. It adds unnecessary stress and anxiety to what is an already difficult decision and sometimes in awful, harrowing circumstances. Nobody makes the decision to access a termination lightly and removing this mandatory three-day wait will not stop anyone who wants to take more time to make their decision. Removing this unnecessary wait period is the right thing to do and instead of offering isolation, we would be offering compassion. Women deserve dignity, women deserve respect and, crucially, women deserve trust - trust to make that decision for themselves in their own time about their own pregnancies without a mandatory delay.

Sentiment score: 0.18