The Chair of the Oireachtas Health Committee, Pádraig Rice of the Social Democrats, talks a lot about listening to women’s voices. But when women’s testimony doesn’t chime with his own ideological stance, he appears far less interested in what they have to say.
Rice and some of his committee colleagues have carefully choreographed the current hearings that are supposed to provide “detailed scrutiny” of Sinn Féin’s bill to abolish the three-day wait. Rather than genuinely test the case for removing it, the hearings are geared towards one outcome: getting the bill through to the next stage.
Inviting the ICGP and HSE fitted neatly into that approach. Their positions on the three-day wait were already well known, so Rice and his closest allies on the committee could have had little doubt about what they were going to say.
What wasn’t planned for, however, was how poorly they would perform when questioned by Oireachtas members, particularly the ICGP.
That put pressure on Rice and others to allow different voices to be heard. There is little doubt that this, in turn, was why Dr Andrew O’Regan and Dr Kirsten Fuller were invited at very short notice to appear before the committee on Wednesday.
Both doctors gave a strong defence of the three-day wait. Rice and others may now be wondering whether inviting them was such a wise move after all.
There was one group, however, that the committee chair and others were not prepared to hear from: women who attended their first abortion appointment, changed their minds during the three-day reflection period and went on to have their babies.
After the committee refused to meet them, the women held their own meeting on Wednesday in Buswells Hotel, beside Leinster House.
There, each woman spoke about her experience and explained why she believes the three-day wait is the reason her child is alive today.
The contrast between their plain-spoken, personal testimonies and the choreographed, politically driven committee hearings could hardly have been greater for the Oireachtas members who attended.
A total of 29 Oireachtas members came to Buswells to meet the women and hear their stories – considerably more than would have been present had their request to appear before the Health Committee been granted.
The committee’s radically pro-abortion members have made a series of missteps in their handling of the hearings over the past three weeks. But their biggest miscalculation to date was refusing to meet the women who availed of the three-day wait – a decision that has backfired spectacularly.
In trying to keep those voices out of the committee hearings, they ultimately gave them a much bigger audience.