Tweedledum has been replaced by Tweedledee as Health Minister, and major problems with our abortion regime are still being ignored
Simon Harris of Fine Gael was the Minister responsible for drafting our 2018 abortion legislation and implementing the arrangements for its implementation. Stephen Donnelly of Fianna Fáil is the Minister now charged with reviewing this legislation, and these arrangements, in 2021.
It has often been remarked, about the two political parties to which these gentlemen belong, that their policies for decades have been mostly indistinguishable from each other, and that it was old Civil War divisions that alone prevented them from sharing power, or uniting to form one large party. There is something almost comical about the current shenanigans of this government which, finally, does see these two parties sharing power together. Fianna Fáil members of the Cabinet have given notably more vocal support recently to a beleaguered Fine Gael Tánaiste, than have his own party colleagues in government.
There is nothing funny at all, however, about the uniformity of approach to the abortion issue by the former and current Health Ministers. Mr Harris refused outright to listen to the concerns expressed by pro-life politicians, when he piloted the 2018 abortion legislation through the Dáil. He interpreted the 2018 referendum result as giving him the right to ignore all suggestions from those quarters. Every last one of them, amendment after amendment, rejected. He ended up with an Act which is well in the running for being the stupidest and cruellest piece of legislation in the history of Dáil Éireann. This is legislation which allows surgical abortions without pain relief, has no provision for counselling whatsoever, and which allows healthy babies of healthy mothers to be aborted in 98% of all cases.
In a sane world, Mr Donnelly would now have a field day unravelling Mr Harris’s legislative and administrative disaster. He belongs to a different party, erstwhile political opponents, and he should be shouting from the rooftops that Mr Harris’s prediction that abortion would be “safe, legal and rare” here had actually turned into abortion being “unsafe, legal and not at all rare”. Obviously unsafe for the babies aborted, but unsafe too for about 8% of the mothers (about 500 women a year) who ended up being referred to hospital post-abortion in 2019, the first year of operation. And anything but rare, with abortions averaging 550 a month in 2019, and showing clear signs of being much higher than that in early 2020, until the pandemic severely restricted social gatherings with consequent reductions in both births and abortions.
Mr Harris, who found the idea of collecting abortion data abhorrent – he was subsequently made Minister in charge of Research, you couldn’t make it up! – bequeathed to Mr Donnelly a regime where it was virtually impossible to find out most of what was actually going on. But Mr Harris could not cover up everything. When abortion providers are paid from the public purse, there will be some evidence somewhere. Parliamentary questions from Carol Nolan TD, about stage payments to abortion providers, elicited the information that nearly 1000 women in 2019 did not proceed beyond the initial consultation with the abortion provider – which makes a compelling case for retention of the 3-day reflection period in the current legislation.
But parliamentary questions from the same TD, about post-abortion referrals to hospital, elicited only the information that a lot of the referrals were due to heavy or persistent bleeding. The question about actual numbers was dodged by the HSE, on the flimsy grounds that not all who were referred to hospital were detained in hospital. The 8% figure quoted above was obtained from the 2019 annual report of the Irish Family Planning Association, and a 2019 survey of abortion-providing doctors published in Science Direct, not from official data.
Some other information, about payments to GP’s for abortions and for managing pregnancies to birth, was put into the public domain by a Dublin-based GP, an elected member of the Medical Council. It was not provided in the official reports from the Department of Health. And no wonder. The payment system negotiated by Mr Harris in 2018 was outrageous. GP’s are paid about €25 per visit for managing a pregnancy to term, but about €110 a visit for dispensing abortion pills.
That is the system which Mr Donnelly inherited, and which he is now called upon to examine. Far from setting about fixing what is clearly a mess, Mr Donnelly has instead taken a leaf out of Mr Harris’s obfuscation handbook. He was asked parliamentary questions recently (by Carol Nolan TD, Eamon O’Cuív TD and Peadar Tóibín TD) about meetings with bodies making submissions in relation to the abortion review. He met with the National Women’s Council of Ireland, a body with formal links to Atheism Ireland, which wants to eliminate the 3-day reflection period (the provision that saved nearly 1000 babies’ lives in 2019). He refused to say if he had yet appointed an “independent expert” to handle the abortion review or how much this individual would be paid. He ignored entirely the question about submissions from bodies who were pro-life, which means presumably that he has not met with any of them and has no plans to do so. His mandate for this high-handed behaviour? He was elected without reaching the quota in Wicklow in the 2020 General Election.
He has made one public pronouncement. He still is committed to “exclusion zones” near the premises of abortion providers. Never mind that they are unnecessary, according to the Garda Commissioner, and unconstitutional according to all legal advice. That is Mr Donnelly’s priority, it seems, in relation to abortion. It ranks ahead of 550 abortions a month, 500 hospital referrals a year, operating on foetuses without pain relief, lack of mandatory counselling prior to an abortion decision, and an insane remuneration system.
When these really important issues eventually come before the Dáil, therefore, expect Tweedledee Donnelly to behave exactly like Tweedledum Harris did in 2018. Complete stonewalling. And the consequences? Even more abortions than we have currently.
550 abortions a month, it seems, is not enough for these people.