Dr. Patricia Lohr:

I am not an epidemiologist but I will speak about the data as well as I understand it. Illegal abortions are very difficult to count. We do know a bit about women who presented to hospital, for example, after having obtained an unsafe abortion in the UK before the Act was passed. Once the Act was passed the numbers of women having abortion did not go up dramatically. I guess that is what the Deputy refers to as floodgates. What we do know and can see in statistics is that, as abortion services became more widely available and abortion became better funded, and women became aware that those services were available and were safe, they did avail of them. Now we see that the number of women accessing abortion has been very stable for several years.