Professor Veronica O'Keane:

The need for counselling will be determined by the woman who has had the experience. Obviously, as the Deputy said very rightly, miscarriage can be a terrible tragedy for some women, and particularly a late miscarriage is devastating. If a woman is devastated she will need counselling. In a similar vein, we may have a woman who had a very early abortion who is not devastated. All of our medical services and psychiatric services are there to respond to need, so we need to have counselling and psychiatry embedded within our obstetric services, and that is something that is going to happen in the future, but if we are planning to legislate for abortion the Deputy is absolutely correct that we need a model whereby counselling services are available prior to and following procedures. We should not discriminate between whether that is an abortion or a miscarriage. There are counselling procedures in place for women who have late miscarriages or stillbirths. They are established in the three maternity hospitals. We need to expand the range of counselling services for abortion and earlier miscarriages. Again, I would say medical services should be responsive to need, and we need to build it in.