Twenty-fifth Amendment of the Constitution Bill 2001
To tighten the Irish constitutional ban on abortion
The Twenty-fifth Amendment of the Constitution (Protection of Human Life in Pregnancy) Bill 2001 (bill no. 48 of 2001) was a proposed amendment to the Constitution of Ireland to tighten the constitutional ban on abortion. It would have removed the threat of suicide as a grounds for legal abortion in the state, as well as introducing new penalties for anyone performing an abortion, by giving constitutional status to legislation proposed to be enacted after the amendment. It was narrowly rejected in a referendum held on 6 March 2002, with 50.4% against.
Overview
In 1983 the Eighth Amendment introduced a constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland. The X Case in 1992 established the right of Irish women to an abortion if a pregnant woman's life was at risk because of the pregnancy, including from the risk of suicide. Later in 1992, three separate constitutional amendments on the subject of abortion were put to a vote. The Twelfth Amendment Bill, which would have excluded the risk of suicide as grounds for abortion was rejected. The Thirteenth Amendment, which guaranteed freedom of travel to obtain an abortion abroad, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed access to information, were both approved.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment was a second attempt to exclude the risk of suicide as grounds for an abortion.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7857740. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2002, 1983 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Twenty-fifth Amendment of the Constitution Bill 2001” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.