Mr. Niall Behan:

There are lots of questions there. I will have to give a fairly thorough answer to them. When a woman presents in our counselling centres, we go through all the options with her. That includes parenting, abortion and adoption. Very few women opt for adoption but they have done so. We work very closely with other adoption agencies when that happens. The counselling we do is non-directive. If that is what the woman wants to do, we will help her work through it and work with the adoption agency but also parenting organisations. In answer to some of the issues Deputy Rabbitte raised, we have plenty of women who present to us with an unintended pregnancy but they decide for various reasons to parent or, very rarely - I can only remember about two cases in the past couple of years - go on to look at adoption.