Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill said today that the Government was not opposing “at first stage” a bill brought forward by left-wing TD Ruth Coppinger which seeks to abolish the three-day period of reflection before a woman undergoes an abortion.
Deputy Coppinger claimed that “termination of pregnancy is a health procedure that is extremely time sensitive” and that the wait period “does not apply to any other medical procedure that we have in law”.
But the Life Institute said that evidence brought forward by TDs such as Carol Nolan and Peadar Tóibín has shown that thousands of women did not return for an abortion after the period of reflection.
“At a time when the Irish abortion rate has already spiralled to almost a shocking 11,000 abortions a year, why on earth would anyone want to take measures that would increase that rate further,” spokeswoman Sandra Parda said.
The pro-life group also hit out at the Health Minister for the government’s failure to express opposition to the abortion bill, saying that the promises which the parties had made in the 2018 referendum to Repeal the 8th were “being broken one after the other”.
Ms Parda said that statistics released by the HSE, which includes all initial consultations for abortions and also the number of women who returned to obtain the abortion pill, showed that 17% of women did not return after the three day wait.
“According to the latest HSE statistics, there were 10,441 abortions in Ireland in 2024. However, the information released to Deputy Nolan shows there were 12,641 initial consultations for abortion, meaning that 2,200 (17.4%) women proceed with their abortion in 2024 after that initial consultation,” she said.
“In fact, the corresponding percentage for 2019 was 11.5% so that proportion seems to be increasing,” she added. “Yet the Health Minister was silent on this in the Dáil and allowed Ruth Coppinger’s remarks to go unchallenged.”
Deputy Coppinger said that figures from the Irish Family Planning Association suggested that the three day wait did not lower abortion rates, but Ms Parda said that the HSE’s own figures showed that was not the case.
“Surely the Health Minister would not welcome a situation where the abortion rate in 2024 was significantly higher and 2,200 additional abortions took place. We’re now aborting the equivalent of the population of Ballina each month, how can the Minister be blind to this,” she asked. “Fine Gael deputies such as Jennifer Carroll MacNeill and Neale Richmond have also voted to return a proposal that would legalise abortion on demand to 6 months – a position that no Fine Gael voter was told would come about in 2018.”
Today, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín said that the “birth rate is collapsing in Ireland as young people lose confidence in the future.”
“The housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, the lack of child care and spiking abortion numbers are playing a role,” he said. “Demographic imbalance is a major threat to service delivery and to pensions.”