The Government promised abortion would be rare: how wrong they were

Almost in the dead of night, the Government published the latest abortion figures late last week. There was no press release. Nothing was done to draw attention to the grim new total. It is as if the Government doesn’t want the figure discussed at all.

Instead, the annual abortion figures were simply published on the Department of Health website which you would have had to be deliberately monitoring to find them. But to cut a long story short, last year at least 10,852 abortions took place here. The actual number is likely to be hundreds higher than that because a proper tally of terminations that took place in hospitals is not included, but let’s make a really conservative estimate and say 11,000 abortions occurred in Ireland last year.

To put this in perspective, in the first full year of our very liberal abortion law’s operation, that is 2019, 6,666 abortions took place in the country. In the meantime, that number has risen by 65%, a big increase in a short time.

The increase categorically proves what pro-life campaigners warned about in the abortion referendum of 2018, namely that if the 8th amendment was repealed, there would be a big increase in the number of terminations. This is indeed what has happened.

Numbers

Prior to the tragic repeal of the 8th amendment, around 3,000 Irish women were travelling annually to Britain for abortions. We don’t know how many were illegally using the abortion pill here, but even pro-choice campaigners didn’t put the number above 2,000 or so. Therefore, taking their estimate, in the run-up to the abortion referendum, maybe 5,000 Irish women were terminating their pregnancies each year. The actual number was probably lower than this, but if we take the figure of 5,000, it means the number of abortions has more than doubled since 2018.

This should concern everyone, pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike. During the referendum of 2018, we were told by prominent pro-choice campaigners that if we repealed the 8th amendment, abortion would be “safe, legal and rare”. One of those who said so was no less a figure than the then-Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar.

In January 2018, he said at a press conference: “If the amendment is approved in a Referendum, abortion in Ireland will become safe, legal and rare, in the situations provided for by the Oireachtas.”

It does not matter how many abortions there are, because whatever is the number, that is how many terminations women want”

Today, seven years on, does it seem as if abortion in Ireland is rare, given that at least 11,000 took place last year?

Does anyone in the present Government think abortion is now rare in Ireland? More importantly, do they even care, or were those just words said back in 2018 to convince voters to sign on the dotted line?

When I raise this issue online and elsewhere, I often hear back from those on the other side that it does not matter how many abortions there are, because whatever is the number, that is how many terminations women want.

Rationale

Logically, this means it doesn’t matter if the number is 100, or 1,000, or 11,000 or 22,000. The number is what the number is. It’s a woman’s choice, and that is that.

This kind of reasoning is, of course, utterly perverse. For a start, it doesn’t care an iota for the lives of the unborn children killed. They are reduced to nothing, not even an afterthought. This is also what pro-life campaigners warned would happen.

But even if you believe that the life of an unborn human being has literally no significance and that there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever, it is still extraordinary not to care how many abortions there are each year.

Whether it is 100 or 11,000 or 22,000 surely makes a massive difference to women involved? Every pregnancy that results in an abortion is a crisis pregnancy at some level or other. Both sides were always able to agree on that. Surely, therefore, those on the pro-choice side should want there to be as few crisis pregnancies as possible meaning as few women as possible have to endure such a crisis?

Plenty of women believe their circumstances gave them no choice but to have an abortion. However, no woman would ever want to be placed in that situation in an ideal world.

We need to examine why crisis pregnancies are becoming ever more common”

So, it makes a vast difference whether abortion is very common or very rare, and in Ireland, crisis pregnancies have become far more common since 2018.

Last year, there were 54,062 births in Ireland. This means that for every six pregnancies there was about one abortion. The percentage of pregnancies that end in abortion keeps rising. Meanwhile, the number of births keeps falling, to well below the number needed to keep our population numbers level without immigration.

What the abortion figures mean is that one pregnancy in six in Ireland is now a crisis pregnancy. What mother or father could be happy that the odds of their daughter facing a crisis pregnancy, and then opting for an abortion, has become so high? Even if the parents voted for repeal in 2018, they probably convinced themselves abortion would be rare, and clearly it is not.

Therefore, we need to examine why crisis pregnancies are becoming ever more common. (The same is happening in Britain, where the abortion rate has been sky-high for years).

Crisis

Unfortunately, we can glean almost no information from the new Government figures because as a matter of deliberate policy it does not gather information on the profile of those who have abortions. In countries like Britain and America, they gather huge amounts of information, but not here. Here, we prefer to say in a state of ignorance as a matter of policy.

Thanks to British and American information, we have a good idea of who is most likely to experience a crisis pregnancy and go on to have an abortion: she will be single (and might or might not be living with the father of her child), she will be in her teens or twenties, and she is more likely than average to be socially disadvantaged. It might well be a repeat abortion, and she might well already have a child.

Above all, the discussion about why the number of abortions has climbed so high needs to be led by those who wanted repealed of the 8th amendment and promised that abortion would be rare. Let them come up with the solutions. This is a problem they created.

Plenty of women believe their circumstances gave them no choice but to have an abortion. However, no woman would ever want to be placed in that situation in an ideal world”