Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I also thank the Irish Family Planning Association for the role it has played and for the provision of women's reproductive health in Ireland. The service has been around a long time. I used it in the 1980s during much darker days for women in terms of accessing reproductive health care. I was afraid to go to my doctor to ask for a coil or the morning after pill and I shared such fear with many women of my generation because we were in those dark times during the 1980s. If one could not afford a private clinic, the only place one could go was the Irish Family Planning Association and it continues to play that role. I will never forget the helpless bewilderment on the faces of counsellors when I told them I wanted an abortion. In those days they could not even give me information on how to go about that because it was before the Regulation of Information (Services Outside the State For Termination of Pregnancies) Act 1995 and it was illegal to give me the phone number of an abortion clinic in Liverpool. I had to get that number under my own steam. I thank the doctors, counsellors and those who worked tirelessly for women over the past decades and provided those services throughout the country. In many cases it was not just in respect of contraception but general sexual health.

As regards the socioeconomic point and the question of the increasing number of women who are in crisis pregnancies because of poverty, do the witnesses have any evidence that poverty impacts on the level of crisis pregnancy? The lack of access to proper contraception such as the permanent reversible contraception of which the witness spoke is a contributory factor. I think it important to repeat something Dr. Henchion said in her submission. She said: "I frequently see women who, having paid all of the costs of going to a private clinic for an abortion, for example, perhaps €600 for an abortion at ten weeks plus the cost of her travel, cannot afford to pay for post-abortion contraception, particularly their preferred method of a long-acting reversible method of contraception". Is it not a huge indictment of the services here that we are supposed to be concerned about the protection of life in our laws which say we are concerned about the foetus and the unborn yet socioeconomically we are condemning more women to crisis pregnancies because of the inaffordability of proper contraception? Can the witnesses confirm if that is the case?

An alarming statement made by Dr. Henchion which flies in the face of what was said about Ireland being one of the safest countries in which to be pregnant is that the increased clandestine and illegal use of the abortion pill means more and more women are left without follow-up post-abortion care. She also said that many of the women she sees do not come back to the IFPA for post-abortion care. Perhaps she could explain why that is so. I suspect it is related to the socioeconomic poverty reasons I have mentioned. Are those who say this is the safest place in the world in which to be pregnant taking into account the IFPA statement which says that a substantial number of women are accessing illegal abortions through the abortion pill and, therefore, do not have follow-up care? "It is an unregulated and unsafe practice, the harms of which are not being reviewed or measured by any public body. No one is being held accountable for this, and the Government cannot continue to ignore it." That is an extremely strong statement. I would like the witnesses to expand on how we, as a society, are leaving ourselves and society as a whole but women in particular open to severe consequences through ignoring their reproductive health in this manner or making it illegal for them to take certain actions.