Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

A number of issues in what the Minister had to say merit a response. Most striking was when he said it has been alleged that the Government is not doing anything to reduce the number of abortions. He immediately pivoted to saying the Government is committed to reducing the amount of unplanned pregnancies. Those are two very different things. It is of course the case that if you seek to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies, that hopefully will lead to a reduction in the number of abortions.

However, the Minister needs to be more honest than he has been there, because he is not in any way committed to reducing the number of abortions directly. It was previously public policy to do so. When abortion referral information was made illegal in 1996, there were clear measures providing that it would be the policy to seek to reduce the number of abortions. That was there in writing. It was a message that was promulgated by the healthcare authorities in this country. That has changed and the Minister should be honest enough to admit that it has changed because, as I pointed out, nobody is allowed to say that abortions are regrettable or that they should be as rare as possible and nobody is allowed to say that we should have policy that encourages women to keep their babies, yet the reality is that many women who have had abortions report feeling that they had no choice because they were unsupported. It would be possible for the Minister and the Government to have a policy that says abortion is legal but it will do its best to encourage people not to have abortions because each time an abortion takes place, a life is lost. The Minister will not face up and use that language honestly. He will not say it is regrettable that that life is lost because either he does not believe it is life we are dealing with, or he does not believe that this is human life that is worthy of protection.The Minister will not use that kind of language. He will talk about how people insist that this is a service, and he will call it a "service" and call it "healthcare" to sanitise it but he will not face up to the truth of what is going on. If he cared about reducing the number of abortions, he would not just be talking about reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies. He would be talking about the need to ensure women are offered positive alternatives to abortion. He does not use that kind of language. We recently had a case, did we not, where somebody nearly died because they had an ectopic pregnancy and that was not picked up, because when they went for an abortion, there was no-----