Six pro-choice technical group TDs voted against the bill: Clare Daly, Joan Collins, Richard Boyd Barrett, Mick Wallace, Joe Higgins and Luke 'Ming' Flanagan. They argued instead for a referendum to repeal the 1983 Constitutional amendment which places the life of the mother and the unborn on an equal footing. Boyd Barrett criticised the exclusion of fatal foetal abnormality in the bill, which he said “will force women whose pregnancies will inevitably end in tragedy to go full term or travel overseas for terminations".