Doctors Rip Claim Abortions Needed for ‘Mental Health’

Irish psychiatrists are condemning the claim that the repeal of Ireland’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting most abortions is necessary for women’s mental health.

“To use ‘health’ as a justification for abortion, when the vast majority of abortions do not take place on any kind of health ground, inverts the true purpose of medicine and doctors who value their calling should have nothing to do with this,” write 24 Irish psychiatrists in a letter regarding the upcoming referendum on the amendment. “Our Minister for Health, for his part, must defend the true purpose of medicine.”

The doctors get immediately to the core of the way in which the Left uses media to advance its narrative in the area of abortion.

“Those pressing for repeal of the 8th amendment are presenting their case in the language of ‘healthcare,’” they write. “We believe that to present the case for repeal in such terms is fundamentally misleading because under the law as proposed by the Government, the vast majority of abortions would involve healthy babies and healthy women. This is not ‘healthcare’ but something else entirely.”

The doctors add:

The Government does not pretend that abortions in the first three months of pregnancy will need a health ground in order for them to take place. This makes it even more misleading for Government spokespeople or pro-choice advocates to continually present abortion as a form of ‘treatment’. It is worth pointing out that about 90 percent of abortions take place during the first three months of pregnancy.

The psychiatrists observe that, after 12 weeks, the proposed law “will conform closely to the law in the UK, where a health ground must be offered as a justification for abortion, before and after 12 weeks. The ‘health ground’ can be physical or mental.”

“As consultant psychiatrists, it is the so-called ‘mental health’ ground that particularly concerns us because we know from official UK statistics that 97pc of the almost 200,000 abortions which occur annually in the UK, take place under the ‘mental health’ ground,” they say.

The doctors point out the Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution itself acknowledges in its recent report, “What became clear during evidence is that the majority of terminations are for socio-economic reasons.”

“This is yet another reason why it is so dishonest to justify the proposed and radical change to the current law as ‘healthcare,’” the psychiatrists assert, adding their deep concern that “the ‘mental health’ of the mother ground will be used to justify aborting babies with disabilities, including those with Down Syndrome.”

The Irish Cabinet formally approved a referendum on whether the 8th amendment should be repealed to take place on May 25th. The amendment provides for equal protection for mothers and their unborn babies. A repeal of the amendment would allow for unrestricted abortions up to 12 weeks’ gestation.

Steven Aden, Chief Legal Officer & General Counsel at Americans United for Life, tells Breitbart News the Irish psychiatrists are “exactly right.”

“The American experience has been that allowing abortions for ‘mental health’ reasons opens the door to rubber-stamp abortions for any reason or no reason – abortion on demand,” he explains. “When the U.S. Supreme Court imposed abortion on all 50 states in 1973, it defined the ‘health’ exception for abortions at any time in pregnancy to include ‘all factors – physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age – relevant to the wellbeing of the patient. All these factors may relate to health.’”

Aden notes in the United States, “One abortionist in the Midwest notoriously approved a late-term abortion for a young woman who was ‘stressed out’ because her pregnancy kept her from attending a rock concert.”

Dr. Eamon McGuinness, former chairman of Ireland’s Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, recently exposed the “sustained campaign” that uses disinformation to suggest that Ireland’s constitutional protection of unborn children puts “women’s lives at risk,” Breitbart News reported.

“The Eighth Amendment has one medical effect only: it prevents Irish doctors from deliberately, as an elective matter, causing the death of an unborn child,” McGuinness wrote. “It awards to the child in the womb the right to have their life protected in Irish hospitals, in Irish GP surgeries, and in Irish operating theatres.”

However, Ireland’s Medical Council guidelines, already require doctors to act to save a mother’s life if her pregnancy poses a true threat to her life.