The Pro-Life Campaign and the Irish Family Planning Association have criticised the Government for its lack of action following the release of Irish abortion figures by the British Office for National Statistics.
The figures show that 5,892 women giving Irish addresses had abortions in Britain last year. In 1997 the figure was 5,336. In addition, the figures for the first quarter of this year showed that the number of women who had abortions in Britain was 1,520, an increase of 62 compared to the same time last year.
Of those who had abortions between January and March this year 600 were aged between 20 and 24. A further 359 women in the 25-to-29 age group had abortions. Sixty-four women were aged between 30 and 35 while 179 were over 35.
The deputy chairwoman of the Pro-Life Campaign questioned the Government's commitment to tackling the abortion rate. Ms Geraldine Martin said the last time there was a government strategy on crisis pregnancies was the Abortion Information Act which had "inevitably contributed to the increased abortion rate".
The Government needed a strategy "to tackle in a creative and sensitive manner the issue of crisis pregnancy, including increasing the resources to caring organisations that offer women real and positive alternatives to abortion".
Mr Tony O'Brien, chief executive of the Irish Family Planning Association, said, however, that whatever else the 1995 Abortion Information Act had done, it had at least encouraged women to be much more open about their crisis pregnancies.
Two years before the Act, an IFPA survey of 230 women with crisis pregnancies found that 36 per cent of them had not told anybody about their pregnancy before going to see a counsellor. Following the implementation of the Act, a survey of 245 women in similar circumstances showed that only 7.3 per cent had not told anybody before going to a counsellor.
The IFPA had made a substantial submission to the Government on its proposed Green Paper on abortion. He said that since the last referendum, the Government could say that it was a pro-life society but it had done nothing constructive to tackle the situation. The real issues were inadequate services and a situation which was not supportive enough for people to contemplate single parenthood.
Asked about calls by Independent TDs for another abortion referendum, the IFPA chief executive said that such calls were totally irrelevant to the 18-20 women going for abortions every day. "You can write whatever you want in the Constitution but it is going to make no practical difference to those women." Mr Patrick McCrystal, executive director of Human Life International, said, however, that if there was an increase in the figures, abortion was only a symptom of a deeper malaise in society which was saturated with sexually-explicit magazines. "Abortion will never come to an end as long as contraception is practised."
He claimed family planning agencies in Britain had said abortion was needed as a back-up to contraception. Human Life International aimed at "restoring the gift of sexuality to marriage according to the Creator's plan". Mr McCrystal added that the organisation believed the way to do this was through educating young people that chastity before marriage was positive and desirable.
