In May 2018, the Irish people voted to legalize abortion by national referendum. In December 2018, Ireland’s abortion regime was formally enshrined in law. On March 14, 2019, an Irish couple aborted their baby boy at 15 weeks after being told that he likely had a fatal fetal abnormality. The doctors were wrong, but the baby was dead. It was too late. His parents now grieve this horror — a forever mistake that cannot be undone.
Year after year, the bloody butcher’s bill for Ireland’s abortion regime now comes due — and the Irish people are discovering that feticide is not quite what they were promised. According to the Irish media outlet Gript: “The number of women making a claim against the State for adverse outcomes of abortion have now risen to 103 since the legislation was introduced, new figures show.” This is yet another rise since November, when numbers were last reported.
This sad stat was confirmed to pro-life Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín TD by the Department of Health, which stated that the State Claims Agency had received these 103 claims of “adverse incidents.” Tóibín has now asked the Minister of Health to give more information on this. His statement is worth reading in full:
There are serious questions to be answered here. We know there are 103 claims with the State Claims Agency, an extraordinary figure. The Minister needs to request further data on these claims – presumably mothers are making claims against the State after having abortions, after suffering an ‘adverse incident.’ It is incumbent on the government to seek more detail on these incidents. 103 seems like a very high number of claims.
We’re all aware of the horrific case in Holles Street, where baby Christopher was aborted after his parents were incorrectly told that he was terminally ill. I am aware of other cases of a similar nature to these. We need a proper investigation into that scandal, and assurances from the Minister that such a thing will never happen again.
The HSE promised that new guidelines would be drawn up to ensure that this would never again. But once the tragic story fell out of the media headlines new guidelines never materialised. There will be an in depth abortion legislation review taking place in the state. Yet we cannot get confirmation from the Minister if the circumstances of these 103 adverse claims will feed into the analysis of the abortion review. How do you review abortion legislation and not study why mothers are bring cases against the state on the basis of that legislation.
Unfortunately within the government there seems to be a certain group think on the issue of abortion – the idea that we had that discussion a few years ago, and therefore we cannot talk openly about the issue anymore. We have an extremely sad figure of more than 13,243 babies aborted over the first two years of the new law. In truth each of these is an adverse incident. In each case the life of an individual living human being has been ended.
“Now we know also that 103 claims of ‘adverse incidents’ have been notified to the State Claims Agency. In each of these cases there is a mother and a family severely affected. The government cannot ignore this human and financial cost, and must provide information to prevent them happening again.
