Mary Henry (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, Deputy Callely. Crisis pregnancies have been with us since the dawn of time. It is splendid that we are addressing this issue in the House as ten years ago it would not have been addressed. When I was a young doctor in the Rotunda Hospital, there was no such thing as a crisis pregnancy. We chose to ignore the issue for as long as we could, which has caused incredible distress to people. I warmly commend all those who brought forward this very useful strategy document.

I have had considerable experience of dealing with people with crisis pregnancies because I am the president of Cherish, which was a single mothers' organisation but is now a single parents' organisation. Some 30 years ago I felt brave merely trying to give support to this organisation, which is incredible because now if any right thinking person did not give it support, he or she would be considered quite dreadful. That reflects a major and welcome change in our society.

We are particularly considering this matter from the point of view of abortions and how to ensure the number of women who go England for abortions is reduced. We never had a problem with illegal abortion but we had one with infanticide, which should be remembered. All too sadly, incidents of infanticide have occurred in the recent past in cases of concealed pregnancies in particular. I am delighted the strategy document suggests we must address the situation regarding concealed pregnancies because it is also important in this context.

Abortion can never be considered a suitable method of family planning, as was said at the Cairo conference which I attended, but we must recognise that it happens. I was interested to read in the report that women who went to England had a deep conviction that it was best thing for them to do and that they made the decision quickly. One of the problems is that many women go to England without consulting anyone here. A friend of mine who worked for the Irish Family Planning Association and is sadly now dead, Dr. Anne Legge, used to tell girls who came to her looking for information in this area to go home and think about it as they would be very little more pregnant the following day. I thought it was great advice in that at least people would give themselves time and space before they made such an extremely important decision.

The Positive Options campaign appears to be very good. The cards and leaflets given out with telephone numbers on the back should encourage people, if not to contact their general practitioners who, in the main, are sympathetic in these circumstances, to contact some of the agencies such as Cherish, CURA and Life to get advice to avoid making a rushed decision. I commend, as I am sure do other Members, the way the report has been brought forward.

The report points out that a crisis pregnancy can occur in a stable marriage. A teenager may not consider pregnancy a crisis or too untoward an event in her life. We have an enormous amount to do in the field of education with teenagers. Senator O'Toole will not forgive me for mentioning teachers again, but the relationships and sex programmes in the schools must be promoted more. The popular culture regarding sexual activity which teenagers observe is not productive towards a healthy sexual lifestyle. If they were to carry on in the way suggested in some popular television programmes, the risk of catching sexually transmitted diseases would be incredibly high. Sadly, we must recognise that this area should be addressed as well as the fact that a person might become pregnant because clinics report an increase in sexually transmitted diseases. It is sad to think of girls getting chlamydia, which does not have many symptoms, and subsequently becoming infertile as a result of such infection.

We are not making sufficient facilities available for teenagers to get support on the decisions they make regarding sexuality. If they decide on sexual activity, it would be a good idea if they were in a position to go to clinics such as the Irish Family Planning Association. I was depressed to receive a letter last autumn from the Minister of State's area indicating that the Northern Area Health Board, which subsidises medical card services at the IFPA can no longer afford to do so, and that it is understood it would not be in position to do so for the remainder of 2003. However, these young people are unfortunately the people we need to be in a position to support. Perhaps the Minister of State could ask health boards to ensure this type of situation does not arise. How can we introduce preventative measures if we do not ensure that those who are the most needy and may have the most socio-economic problems regarding a pregnancy can get advice?

As Senator Feeney said, the increase in the use of contraception by women was welcome, but the decrease in its use by men is terribly worrying, particularly regarding sexually transmitted diseases. Something must be done regarding the education of boys. I spoke to a teacher who depressingly told me that when he was giving sex education classes, he sent the boys out to play football. That is not what was intended by the Department of Education and Science when it brought forward those programmes. Officials in the Department should read the booklets issued by the Department of Education in Uganda, the African country that has had the highest rate of decrease in the incidence of HIV infection. Its booklets are explicit and encourage teenagers to delay what is described as their sexual debut until they are further on in their education. They ask why would one get involved in sex in P5 rather than wait until P7. That may sound simplistic but apparently it is working and the children who are in the education system there are doing much better.

The report points out how frequently socio-economic factors feature in a decision by a young woman to have an abortion. While single motherhood is recognised here now, not all families accept it. The claim they do is a myth. Therefore, a young woman may get little support from her family or the father of the child. That is the reason I and others expressed our concern about the removal of the rent subsidy in the private sector. As the Minister of State is aware, a tenant must be in private rented accommodation for six months before a rent supplement is given. That is not possible in the case of a woman experiencing a crisis pregnancy as she did not plan it. Therefore, how could she be in such accommodation for six months to meet the requirement to avail of the recent supplement? I understand the view of the Department of Social and Family Affairs in this regard because this is an expensive way of dealing with this issue. The crèche allowance was not introduced for single mothers, but again it was availed of by them and was useful. We need to do more regarding housing and other accommodation.

Cherish has recommended that the local authority waiting list should be used to determine the type of houses that need to be built and this practice should be standardised across local authority regions to ensure equality of access to appropriate housing types regardless of location. When the Minister of State, Deputy Noel Ahern, last spoke on housing in this Chamber, he did not give us good news about the type of local authority housing we could hope to see being made available fairly shortly. Cherish also recommends the reintroduction of legislative protection for tenants' rights in the private sector. It also recommends the introduction of incentives to provide equal access to affordable housing for low and single income families. It requests the provision of specialist accommodation for single pregnant women and women experiencing crisis pregnancies, who are at risk of homelessness due to pregnancy, in conjunction with the support of a specialist agency. It recommends the provision of support services, in collaboration with specialist agencies and services working with specifically vulnerable and socially excluded groups, to provide additional supports for those in transit from and at risk of homelessness. We must particularly address the needs of refugees, asylum seekers and other displaced persons in this regard. We had a brief discussion in the House about a girl who was 13 when she became pregnant and 14 when a health board brought her to England for an abortion. I hope the case was followed up closely to find out who impregnated her, as she was in the charge of the State.

Child care costs are another issue, as people take socio-economic factors into account when making decisions on crisis pregnancies and we do not have anything like affordable child care. I welcome the fact that women cannot be dismissed for becoming pregnant under our equality legislation, and the equal status for children whether born within or outside marriage. Those welcome developments in my lifetime have made a difference but we need to take the strategy put forward by the Crisis Pregnancy Agency very seriously. Many of its recommendations are of socio-economic import and I hope the Government will make funding available to support the report's findings.