Professor Veronica O'Keane:

I actually have not had direct contact with somebody. The Senator raises a very important point, namely, that counselling in this area should be completely non-directive. We should support whatever a woman wants to do. The trickiest situations are those in which women do not know what they want to do. They continue through with the pregnancy feeling ambivalent and wondering if they will want the child when it is born. The more ambivalence that is there, the more support women need. We need to direct a considerable amount of our mental health resources to the area of unwanted pregnancies. If women choose to have abortions, that resolves the issue, if the Senator sees what I mean. The situation we are in now, whereby women who choose that they do not want to have a baby and they cannot have a baby, creates a whole set of problems. Non-directive counselling within a framework where we have abortion services available is definitely at the heart of good practice.