Ms Geraldine Luddy:

One of the questions the committee had was what determines a crisis pregnancy. That is a very individual issue relating to the woman or the couple involved. For some women, a crisis pregnancy may be because of all sorts of reasons. It might because the woman has had two children, is now having a third and the first is nine months old. There could be all sorts of reasons. Not all of them will go to counselling for their crisis because it may only last an evening or a night or because they have other support systems in place. That is a more generic sort of issue.

The 1995 Act with the very long Title is an Act designed to do a very narrow thing. It is designed for and applies to women with a crisis pregnancy who wish to seek information about services outside the State for a termination of pregnancy. It is quite narrow. It regulates that information. The Act states very clearly that when information of that nature is given out, the accompanying non-directive information has to be truthful and objective. If there is a breach of that Act, it is against the law. However, under section 10 of the Act, in order to activate that, the individuals would have to take that complaint to the Garda themselves. That is already covered in the Act.

With regard to crisis pregnancy counsellors, they are a distinct profession but more and more, they are people who provide a counselling service. The Act obviously covers people who can give advice: doctors, nurses, psychologists and counsellors. Those in the counselling service industry would say that they would really welcome the regulation of counsellors because it would set them with a criterion and would mean that their own profession is protected in some ways.

It is very difficult to capture the rogue agencies or the disingenuous agencies. They pop up and close down fairly quickly. They then open up again under another name in a different place. The crisis pregnancy programme does advertise its services quite well. If women google such terms as "abortion", "I am pregnant" or "I have a crisis pregnancy", the Positive Options services will hopefully pop up first. It has worked with Google and is paying to outbid the word so that its services will come up first. Obviously, the disingenuous agencies are also doing that. That is a constant that is kept under review. It is doing its best. As has been mentioned before, it is very difficult to stamp it out completely. What we have to do is try to cover any angles that we can. We will certainly look at amending the 1995 Act, when counsellors have been regulated under the 2005 Act, to state that it is only registered counsellors that may give this information.