Today hundreds of Irish men and women have been appalled by the actions of a woman claiming to be a counsellor in a Dublin Women’s Centre.
When journalists Ellen Coyne and Catherine Sanz went undercover for the Irish edition of The Times, they exposed the blatant lies and agenda serving advice that The Women’s Centre in Dublin is currently peddling to vulnerable women seeking abortions.
The headline of their piece reads ‘Women told abortion can cause cancer and create sex abusers’ and a video shows the terrifying advice the counsellor offers the undercover reporter.
The reporter was shown “pictures of aborted foetuses and had the body parts identified, and had her psychological status questioned”. Then she was warned off using any other services bar their own because “other British abortion clinics could give her an infection”.
She was told that having an abortion could harm her reproductive system, cause breast cancer, and could lead to abuse of future children, the counsellor told her:
“That’s not to say women get their kids and knock the head off them. It means they have been known to neglect their children or overprotect them- it’s a psychological thing.”
Now Irish doctors have responded to the video and stated that women deserve to be treated better.
Doctors for Choice have rejected the advice in the video saying:
“The videoed “information” given to a young woman who presented herself as pregnant to a Dublin “advice” clinic is entirely untrue and dangerous.”
“International medical guidelines state that the abortion pill can be prescribed up to at least 9 weeks in pregnancy.”
“Furterhmore there is no reputable published research and no medical evidence for an increased risk of breast cancer or psychological sequelae from abortion, when compared to women who have completed pregnancies.”
“To suggest that women who have had abortions are more likely to perpetrate child abuse is to heap insult on top of the stigma already imposed on the more than 100,000 women who have been forced to leave Ireland to access safe legal abortion services.”
“Irish women deserve access to safe, legal abortion, regulated as are other medical services. They deserve evidence-based, unbiased information provided in a setting where basic first principles regarding counselling apply – where there is no agenda regarding the decisions they reach and the advice is non-directive.”
“Again, the Eighth Amendment must be repealed to allow the provision of abortion services to Irish women.”
