An academic article by Mary Donnelly and Claire Murray (‘Choosing to Provide: Early Medical Abortion and Clinician Conscience in Ireland’), published in September 2024 in the Health Care Analysis journal, has stated that 10% of GPs are now performing abortions. The article took aim at the 90% of doctors who are exercising their freedom of conscience and declining to engage in the abortion process, by stating that some abortion doctors felt it was “stigmatising for providers”. It is ironic that abortion providing doctors could characterise their colleagues’ non-participation as “stigmatising”, yet does not feel that tax-payer funded “values” workshops which aim to persuade medics to provide abortions are not also somehow stigmatising of those doctors who don’t want to provide abortions.
In one section, the article claims that doctors had received suspicious phone-calls, including requests by male callers for the provision of abortion care to minors. This was linked in with so-called attempted “stings”. But it must be stressed, that there is a serious concern about safeguarding due to the current telemedicine regime. The Irish Examiner reported in October 2022 that an underage girl was “locked in room and forced to take abortion tablets”. The abortion tablets would have been acquired through the insecure and unsafe telemedicine ‘service’, which has been in operation since 2020.
In addition, the article states that doctors’ initial “fears” of pro-life protests described as “violent or extremely intimidating protests… not materialise.” This undercuts the rationale for the introduction of ‘Safe Access Zones’, which was signed into law this summer and became law on 17 th October 2024. In February 2022, extremely hyperbolic language was used in the Seanad to describe the so-called “protests”, with Senator Lorraine Clifford-Lee describing small vigils outside UHL in Limerick as “the terror experienced in Limerick”. Others made similarly unproven claims, such as Senator Alice Mary Higgins who claimed that “many rural GPs have their offices where their homes are. They have been subjected to protests outside their homes.” However, evidence for these claims has never been provided. This article confirms the low-scale and harmless of pro-life vigils, despite the new law’s significant overreach and deleterious impact on civil liberties.