Rape victims have right to abortion, says Prof Clare

Rape and incest victims should have the option of a legal abortion in Ireland, the medical director of St Patrick's Hospital in Dublin, Prof Anthony Clare, told the Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution yesterday.

He was replying to Ms Marian McGennis TD (FF), who asked him if he would support a legal or constitutional provision for a termination in cases where it was established that there was rape or incest involved.

Prof Clare replied: "Yes. I really do feel it repugnant, as a man, that we would live in a society where someone who was raped. . .or who would have been made pregnant as result of consistent or one-off sexual abuse in a family, or by a stranger, is forced then to carry that pregnancy against her will."

Dr Clare said he respected those who took a different view. "But I do not agree with them."

Prof Clare said that he would strongly support non-directive counselling for women contemplating an abortion. "If we really want to influence termination rates, then we must be able to have as open a discussion with women, pregnant and non-pregnant, about the issue of pregnancy and the dilemmas and difficulties as we possibly can.

"I cannot understand how a psychiatrist could argue that you can do that in a setting where one of the options is completely ruled out, or cannot be discussed, or is completely not on, particularly since in practice it is on across the water."

Prof Clare said that just changing laws and regulating the Constitution would be insufficient. After non-directive counselling, there had to be some kind of guidance about where women seeking abortions could safely go. "That is if they still opt for termination and, hopefully, fewer of them would."

Asked by the committee's chairman, Mr Brian Lenihan TD (FF) if there was any practical measure to reduce the rate of abortion, he said there should be a complete look at how human behaviour was taught to young people. "Human psychology is not touched. So if you want to discuss with children issues like bullying, or sexual relationships, it is in an artificial setting."

He urged those who felt "so forcefully" about abortion to step back and look at the issue of sexual and human relationships and how parents could be helped to instill a reasonable degree of personal responsibility in young adults, particularly males.

Ms Liz McManus TD (Labour) said that every person who had come before the committee so far to make a presentation was male. "I am going back to the times when women had to struggle very hard to win the right to control their own fertility. It was a very good thing that change occurred in Irish society."

She asked Prof Clare if he felt Irish society had moved on in terms of facing up to its responsibilities. "There has always been the conduit of going to Britain for all our problems, from emigration to unmarried mothers," Prof Clare replied.

He said one of the reasons he had not approached the committee - he had been asked to give evidence - was because he was "another of these men." But it had been pointed out to him by his wife that the gender divide on termination did not split the way it was thought. "Not every woman is liberal and not every man is conservative." While Ms McManus might be right about the change in Irish society, they should be careful before assuming that because people were so reasonable in the debate before the committee, "the steam has gone out of the issue."

Prof Clare said that the full extremes were there and were articulated very powerfully in a briefing document supplied by the committee. "I think those people who feel that Ireland is the last decent bastion of civilised sense, when it comes to protecting the unborn, are waiting."

With due respect to the Celtic Tiger and the great changes in people's moral and intellectual positions, Prof Clare said he felt that abortion touched something very basic in the heart of every Irish person. "I think that is why the debate here in Ireland is sometimes the most thoughtful and the most serious, as well as the most appalling and disagreeable. It is because it matters."