Tag Archives: Women’s Centre

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You may recall how Ellen Coyne and Catherine Sanz, of The Times Ireland Edition, went undercover at an ‘abortion advice’ centre in Berkeley Street, Inns Quay, Dublin 7.

Last month, they reported how a woman working at the clinic, who claimed to be a counsellor, told Ms Sanz that when a pregnancy ended unexpectedly a woman’s reproductive system could be damaged and that it could cause breast cancer.

Ms Sanz was also told that abortion could lead to women abusing their children in the future.

Further to this…

Ms Coyne reports this morning:

Unregulated crisis pregnancy agencies will be made illegal under a new bill proposed in response to an undercover investigation by The Times.

Brendan Howlin, the Labour leader, is hoping to pass the “much-needed” legislation as soon as possible after a clinic run by a Catholic group was exposed claiming that abortions could cause breast cancer and turn women into child abusers.

The bill, introduced to the Dail yesterday, would amend the Health and Social Care Professionals Act to add crisis pregnancy counsellors to the list of health professions regulated by the state. The move would make them subject to checks and any complaints against them would be examined.

… The [Women’s Centre on Berkeley Street] centre is linked to the Good Counsel Network, a Catholic anti-abortion group that holds protests outside clinics in Britain and has defended the Magdalene laundries. It is also connected to a man who was found in a 1999 High Court case to have used a similar clinic to illegally adopt a baby from a woman who had been talked out of an abortion.

Labour bill targets rogue crisis pregnancy agencies (The Times Ireland edition)

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After listening with mounting horror to the details of the “advice” from a so-called crisis pregnancy advice clinic, I was horrified to read that Minister for Children Katherine Zappone was merely “considering” regulation of these clinics and that Minister for Health Simon Harris and the HSE are powerless to regulate or prosecute, and must instead compete with these unsupervised agencies.

I hope it would be agreed by everyone that people in such vulnerable situations deserve accurate and unbiased information, and that the provision of blatantly false and harmful advice is unacceptable and reprehensible in the extreme. The time for acceptance of this inaction is long since passed, and these departments must act now to stop others from suffering.

Dr Mark O’Loughlin,
Clinical Lecturer,
Registrar in Histopathology,
Galway University Hospital.

Pregnancy counselling and regulation (Irish Times letters page)

Previously: Behind The Blue Door

Related: Women’s Centre may have broken the law, says Harris (The Times Ireland edition, Ellen Coyne)