Ms Marie O'Shea:

During the research, I heard from the service providers I spoke to that we needed better monitoring and evaluation systems to develop better public policy around the delivery of termination-of-pregnancy services. There is certainly no reason, if it were possible, not to collect those data as well. It would be interesting to collect them from a public policy point of view.

The other issue is that, in doing this research, although we had a limited period, I think a retrospective study of people who did not attend for the second review would be very difficult to do. Many people do not attend their own GP for the service but go to a different GP because in many areas there are very few GPs who provide it. One would be relying on GPs for the actual recruitment of these people.

Second, I have sat on two ethics committees for a long time and I do not think an ethics committee would necessarily approve that type of retrospective research looking at that issue because of the potential harm it could do to somebody to get an invitation to engage in research as to why they considered having an abortion where the child is sitting there in front of them. This is just my personal view from my experience, but I think that would be difficult.

Certainly, monitoring and evaluation of the whole service should be considered. I do not think it is necessary, as to whether or not this committee considers legislative change, to amend that provision. We are not suggesting that the model of care changes. I am a legal person and I talk about rights. There is a right to a second visit that is free of charge as well, and I do not think this committee can disregard what we heard about the barriers this is causing to people who potentially time out because of the three-day wait or because of the three-day wait combined with the lack of 365-day services in the hospital setting, which is where a person has to go from ten weeks. Also, that cohort of people who are accessing inclusion medicine services have chaotic lifestyles, and coming back for a second appoint, to them, if they have an addiction or are homeless, can be quite challenging. We have quotations in that regard in Dr. Duffy's report. It was also something that was said to me quite a lot by medical practitioners working in the community. They talked about the difficulty with providing care to those persons. They are discriminated against by the three-day wait.