The Programme for Government contains very little reference to abortion, apart from a commitment to “ensure that all maternity hospitals provide equitable access to termination of pregnancy services” which may be setting the authorities up for a clash with healthcare professionals on conscience rights.
The document is notably silent on the spiralling abortion rate. That is a missed opportunity. Quite apart from the moral implications of turning a blind eye to the enormous number of lives being ended, ignoring the impact on our plummeting birth rate is politically and economically reckless and short-sighted.
There were 10,033 abortions recorded by the Department of Health as having taken place in Ireland in 2023: more than three times the number who travelled to Britain for abortions in 2018, before abortion was legalised here – while then Minister for Health, Simon Harris, suggested some 1,000 women may also have accessed abortion pills from abroad.
If the same number of abortions occurred in 2024 – and early indications suggest they will – close to 50,000 abortions will have taken place since January 2019. So much for it being “safe, legal and rare”.
There were 6,666 abortions in 2019, 6,577 in 2020 and 6700 in 2021 – before another sudden shock surge to 8,156 abortions in 2022 and then another spike to 10,033 lives ended in 2023.
If measures are not taken to examine, understand and tackle the soaring numbers of abortions, it is possible – and probable – that up to a staggering 100,000 abortions will have taken place by end of next Dáil term, a horrifying total in a small country like Ireland where less than 55,000 births were recorded in 2023.
The figures show that more than one in seven babies are now being aborted – and while abortion rates have been rising fast, our birth rate continues to fall and fall again, with CSO Quarter 2 of 2024 figured showing fertility has collapsed to the dismal point of just 1.5 (the average number of babies born per woman), which is far below replacement level.
This issue was addressed head-on by the newly-inaugurated Vice President of the U.S. JD Vance this week, when, in his first public speech, he told the massive crowd at the March for Life in Washington that society has “failed to recognize the obligation that one generation has to another is a core part of living in a society to begin with.”
“A culture of radical individualism took root, one where the responsibilities and joys of family life were seen as obstacles to overcome, not as personal fulfillment or personal blessings,” Vance said.
There’s a ring of truth – and familiarity – about that. The culture of individualism in this country also preaches the same, in particular, that children and pregnancy are barriers to goals, rather than being the most important job in the world.
The Vice-President said that it was the job of government to help people have babies and raise families: “And it is the task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world and to welcome them as the blessings that we know they are here at the March for Life.”
That’s a mightily important acknowledgment from the second most important person in the new U.S. administration – that it is the job of government to help people have children, because (and try to say it without Whitney Houston singing in your head), children are the future.
I know that’s not a revelation, it’s perfectly bloomin’ obvious, but what does it tell us about the radical birth dearth we are seeing now? That many of us have lost faith in a future? That’s pretty grim.
Vance added: “So let me say, very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America” – saying that the U.S. had failed a generation because the country had embraced a “culture of abortion on demand.”
“We need a culture that celebrates life at all stages, one that recognizes and truly believes that the benchmark of national success is not a GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families, in our country,” he told the crowd.
He could have equally been speaking about Ireland, where the establishment’s commitment to family life and raising children has fallen off a cliff, and where we’ve heard far more about abortion access in the past decade than about our collapsing birth rate and the calamitous effect that will have on growth, prosperity, and human flourishing.
As I have repeatedly written, successive Irish governments have adopted policies on everything from housing to taxation to cultural projects which have utterly failed to support the crucially important role that families play, not just in human flourishing, but in stability, prosperity, and economic growth. A collapse in birth rate, experts warn, is followed by the kind of consequences for civilizational chaos that we are determinedly ignoring at this point, and will likely keep doing so until it may be too late.
Yet our government, even with coffers full to brim from the Corporation Tax of multinationals, refused to increase Child Benefit payments for an almost unbelievable 13 years, while also failing to give tax credits for the essential and most costly outlay for any taxpayer, raising the kids.
Instead, we had the distasteful spectacle of the Minister for Health enthusiastically talking up the rise in abortion rates – while his predecessor, Simon Harris, now Tánaiste, ensured that the pathetic record keeping on abortion in this country means we know almost nothing about why so many women are seeking abortions.
A collapsing birth rate accompanied by soaring abortion rates is leading Ireland down a path to an existential crisis – to becoming a country with fewer and fewer births per family, and fewer and fewer marriages and families. That’s a bleak future which doesn’t bode well for anyone, no matter how much we value rugged individualism.
The truth is that many women are being made to feel they have no choice on abortion – because being ‘pro-choice’ usually actually means telling women they are on their own. And shiny, modern Ireland may have a record number of Starbucks but the culture increasingly doesn’t value marriage, lifelong fidelity, childrearing, or motherhood.
These are profound questions for society, and for the men and women who seem to increasingly be directed towards atomised lives, marked more by mistrust and disconnect than optimism for the future. But where is the senior government Minister, à la Vance, acknowledging that there is a problem, a very significant problem, one that the government takes seriously and will act accordingly?
Vance said that the first Trump administration “supported pro-family policies like doubling the child tax credit” – and promised “we’re going to do so much more on in the second administration”. That sounds like a good start. Meanwhile, here in Ireland, we’re getting told that the real problem is with abortion access, in other words, that the concern should be that some additional abortions to the 10,000 a year don’t take place.
At 10,000 abortions a year, we are literally aborting our future. That’s an issue far more pressing than bike sheds or Dáil speaking rights, yet the legacy media remains silent, heads stuck firmly in the sand, while, with some brave exceptions, TDs mostly twiddle their thumbs.
There are individual TDs now within the Coalition who have taken a pro-life stance in the past – and TDs in Opposition who have long called for a better answer than abortion for mothers and babies. In the face of the growing crisis, its long past time for every member of government to set aside past petty triumphs and seriously tackle this issue.