Two of the country’s most prominent pro-abortion organisations, the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) and the abortion-supporting doctors’ group START, focussed their attacks this week on Breda O’Brien’s recent powerful article defending the three-day period of reflection before an abortion.
Given all that has happened in recent weeks – including the defeat of the Soc Dem bill in the Dáil seeking to abolish the three-day wait – the latest interventions from both groups bring home, in a fresh and striking way, just how impoverished their arguments really are. Their hostility to even a brief period of reflection exposes the weakness of their case, and underlines why we must keep up the pressure to ensure they do not get their way.
While Breda’s article in The Irish Times cited official HSE data showing that one in six women who had an initial abortion consultation did not return for an abortion after the three-day wait, the IFPA and START, in their replies on the letters page of the same newspaper, offered little more than the same tired talking points and debunked statistics. Once again, their responses did not address the central fact: the three-day wait gives many women the time and space to reconsider.
In its letter, the IFPA referenced that the World Health Organisation had found no health benefit of waiting periods before an abortion. But that framing misses the central point. Abortion itself has nothing whatsoever to do with genuine healthcare – it is about one thing and one thing only – ending a life. WHO undoubtedly does valuable work in many areas, but, sadly, on abortion it has long allowed politics to override evidence and ethics.
The WHO’s name carries obvious weight, and that is clearly the reason pro-abortion groups lean on it so heavily. But at this stage, the tactic is entirely predictable: rarely does a pro-abortion press release appear without the WHO being quoted or referenced somewhere.
Every second sentence from abortion advocates these days seems to slot in sanitising terms like “abortion care” and “healthcare” in an effort to give the abortion industry a veneer of respectability. But no amount of carefully chosen language can disguise what is really taking place. A recent series of interviews by academics in schools of nursing and perinatal health in Ireland captured the words of one Irish midwife who participates in abortions: “In theatre during a termination … you kind of have to take yourself out of the room a little bit in your head cause I think if I thought about it too much, I would have gotten upset, just the physical thought of what’s actually happening.”