Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is relevant. The Minister referred to counselling being non-directive but when people were found to have told women, for example, that they should lie about their abortion and say they had a miscarriage, the advice was criticised by the then master of the Rotunda Hospital as being potentially life-endangering. We must be very careful about who we give credit to for being non-directive. When counsellors have been found to discourage women from looking at ultrasound images, we can see that a service holding itself as non-directive is sometimes more than suggestive in trying to encourage people along the abortion pathway. It is to prevent such negative activity and try to make sincere the aspiration expressed by the Minister that he would wish abortion to be rare that it is very important to offer correct and relevant information.

Too often we have heard about women and parents who have said if only they had known about the hurt that abortion would cause or about the stage of development of a baby, they may have made a different choice. The provision of information in the way this amendment proposes is liberating and it does not subtract from the right that the legislation is giving to terminate a pregnancy. It is liberating in the sense that it might free women from making a decision that they would come to regret or that they would not have made if they had the information in question. The information required to be presented, both orally and in the form of printed literature, including in cases where families receive a diagnosis that a baby in utero has a life-limiting condition, would be important as it could mention perinatal hospice care, for example. The information either would be redundant because the woman knows it already or it would be needed if she does not already know it, and she deserves to be informed.Subsection (3) of the amendment states:

(3) Where it is intended that a termination of pregnancy be performed using abortion-inducing drugs, the person who supplies the drugs to the woman intending to have the termination of pregnancy shall, orally and in person, inform the woman of the following:

(a) that it may be possible to reverse the effects of the abortion-inducing drugs should she change her mind, but that time is of the essence; and

(b) that information on reversing the effects of abortion-inducing drugs is available in the document referred to in subsection (6).

Think about that for a moment. The Leas-Chathaoirleach is a businessman and he knows that in all sorts of other areas of business people have a cooling-off period.