Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I hate to start on a note like that because I do now have to talk about a very sad topic. I listened to the report about the HSE report into abortion as part of the three-year review yesterday on RTÉ and I thought it was tragically tendentious and horribly biased. There was no talk of whether women who chose not to go through with abortions after the initial consultation were interviewed. There was no talk about the report that doctors are disturbed that in the case of late-term abortions, there are children who remain alive. There was no talk about whether precautionary pain relief should be administered. There was no talk about reducing abortions by seeing it as something that should be rare or about giving women the option of seeing ultrasound, all the many hard questions that have to be asked about how abortion operates in our country now.I agreed somewhat with the Leader last week on the need to reduce the number of abortions. She saw the matter first and foremost in terms of contraception access. We should not only see abortion as something to be reduced or to be used when contraception fails; we should also see it as something we want to reduce because it is something regrettable. Let us at least agree on that. At the moment, we have a perverse use of language. Abortion is being described in the media, very flippantly, as abortion care. There is no care for the baby involved. Let us never forget that.

Since the commencement of the current law, we have seen approximately 21,000 unborn babies aborted in just three years. That is a harrowing reality. It is a massive explosion in the numbers. The case for reducing the numbers is not getting an airing. The reason we have to guess rather than know for sure how many abortions have taken place is because the Minister has still not released the abortion numbers for last year as required under the law. Why is this Minister never honouring his obligations in this area? He has consistently used the phrase "in the coming weeks". In the context of making an announcement on the future of telemedicine abortion policy, however, he keeps postponing facing up to his responsibilities.