The Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) has confirmed it will begin performing abortions in Ireland on January 7.
Abortion officially became legal in the Republic of Ireland on December 20, when President Michael D. Higgins signed new legislation into law.
In May, a campaign to save the country’s Eighth Amendment – which banned abortion – overwhelmingly lost in a referendum vote.
A pro-abortion rights campaign revealed by DCLeaks.com in 2017 to have been funded, in part, by billionaire investor George Soros and his Open Society Foundation proved successful as referendum exit polls suggested many voters relied on the abortion industry and left-wing media for their information about abortion.
LifeSiteNews reported on the Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Bill that was rushed into law in December:
The new Irish abortion regime, which is in many ways even more extreme than the law in the UK, allows abortion on demand up until 12 weeks. As this analysis of the bill explains, a baby can also be aborted until viability (around 6 months) where there is a risk to the life, or of serious harm to the health, of the woman. The risk of “serious harm” to health is not defined, and is open to interpretation. Health as used here includes both physical and mental health. In the UK, the vast majority of abortions are carried out under the same mental health ground.
Abortion is allowed up to birth in a medical emergency, and when the baby has a life limiting condition.
Amendments introduced by pro-life TDs, including those aiming to ensure pain relief for the baby in late term abortions, to ban abortion for disability or gender, and to ensure dignified disposal of aborted babies’ remains, were all rejected.
Chris Fitzpatrick, a consultant obstetrician and gynecologist at the Coombe hospital, wrote at the Irish Times that the push to start performing abortions is undermining clinical and safety concerns.
“In an unprecedented departure from normal clinical practice, we may well have a situation in January in which those of us, who are not conscientious objectors, may find ourselves under pressure to undertake certain medical procedures for which we have received little or no training,” he wrote. “Healthcare managers and politicians appear to have little interest in this. And once the legislation is passed, well then it is over to the doctors”:
Irish Examiner columnist Gerard Howlin observed welcoming the procedure that ends an unborn life is “the final nail in our old identity’s coffin,” asking, “Who are we now?”
Howlin wrote that Ireland once “equated values with revealed religion” but now has “swapped all that for public opinion.”
The Gaelic language and Catholicism, he continued, were lost in Ireland decades ago.
“In shifting our identity, abortion is comparable to the loss of the Irish language after the Famine, and to the rejection of organised religion, as prescribed the Catholic Church, over the past 40 years,” he explained. “Ireland is as defined now by what it walked away from as what it stands for.”