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Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution Bill, 1992 (Ireland)

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The Twelfth Amendment was a failed proposal to amend the Constitution of Ireland, to state that the risk of suicide should not be considered a sufficient reason to legally allow an abortion. It was rejected in a referendum on 25 November 1992.

Contents

The full title of the proposal was the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution Bill, 1992. On the same day the "Thirteenth" and "Fourteenth Amendments" were approved. As these could not be renamed the number twelve has simply been 'skipped'. There has therefore officially been no successfully enacted "Twelfth Amendment" of the Irish constitution.

Proposed changes to the text

Proposed insertion of additional text to Article 40.3.3º:

The subsection relating to abortion had originally been added with the Eighth Amendment in 1983. After the rejection of the Twelfth Amendment, and the approval of the Thirteenth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, the full text of Article 40.3.3º read as the follows:

Overview

The referendum in November 1992 was largely in response to Attorney General v. X (more commonly known as the "X case"), in which the state initially obtained an injunction preventing a 14-year-old girl who had become pregnant from rape was threatened with legal action for travelling to the England to obtain an abortion, but which was lifted as there was a threat to her life from suicide. It proposed that the possibility of suicide was not a sufficient threat to justify an abortion. The proposal was put to a referendum on 25 November 1992 but was rejected.

On the same day, the Thirteenth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment were approved by referendum. The former guaranteed freedom of travel abroad to obtain an abortion, and the latter, access to information with respect to the same issue.

In 2002 a second failed attempt was made to rule out the risk of suicide as grounds for an abortion. This was the proposed Twenty-fifth Amendment, which was also rejected in a referendum, but by a much narrower margin.

References

Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution Bill, 1992 (Ireland) Wikipedia