State needs an honest investigation of its abortion counselling services

Are women being informed about all their options - such as continuing a pregnancy or considering adoption - by State-provided services?

In a recent parliamentary question, Ivana Bacik TD asked Stephen Donnelly, Minister for Health, what he was doing about “rogue” pregnancy counselling agencies. The answer seemed to be that he was counter-advertising them to death and reporting them to Google.

Can this really be all that he is doing? The definition of a rogue counselling agency is one that, through unethical, misleading or manipulative techniques, fools women into thinking they are receiving impartial and objective counselling on abortion. Nobody thinks that is good or right.

The Minister says the HSE has taken “several measures” to combat “disingenuous agencies” such as “promoting awareness of My Options – the HSE information and counselling service – through Google search ads, targeted social media, out of home (OOH), radio and digital audio advertising”.

According to Donnelly, the My Options ad “appears as the top ad or as the top organic search result for any related searches”. In addition, “the HSE is monitoring any competitors and has set a bid management strategy to automatically increase its bids if another website appears ahead of theirs. The HSE monitors the search ad performance and that of disingenuous agencies on an ongoing basis and shares feedback with Google.”

READ MORE

Who decides what is a disingenuous agency? Would an honest, straightforward pro-life organisation offering support to continue a pregnancy qualify? We don’t know.

As part of the three-year review of the operation of abortion legislation, the HSE commissioned research on its services, called the Unplanned Pregnancy and Abortion Care (UnPac) study. According to UnPac, My Options mandate is to provide “people seeking care with names and contact details of doctors providing termination of pregnancy; information about all options regarding pregnancy including termination of pregnancy, adoption and/or parenthood; listening support; and telephone counselling if requested; and/or details of community-based pregnancy counselling services”.

Carol Nolan TD also recently asked the Minister to provide spending figures for both abortion services and advertising abortion services. In the answer to one parliamentary question, the HSE explains that it has spent €834,324 between 2019 and 2022 advertising My Options. In another, it says that since January 2019, it allocated €1 million to counselling and €1 million to communications campaigns and a further €28.5 million to abortion providers in hospitals and GP surgeries.

If this huge amount of money is being spent, presumably women are being informed about all their options by State-provided services?

We don’t know. In the UnPac chapter on My Options, 46 women who had accessed abortion up to 12 weeks were interviewed. UnPac appears not to have interviewed anyone who chose not to access abortion. Why?

According to UnPac, while My Options was assessed positively, one client describes “a prevailing sense of its role as a provider of contact details for abortion care providers trumping its role as a provider of counselling and comprehensive information about abortion and other unplanned pregnancy supports”. Another describes it as “a conduit directing women to [abortion] providing doctors”.

This echoes American research: Abortion policy implementation in Ireland: Lessons from the community model of care. It states: “From the perspectives of [abortion-providing] doctors, My Options is a well-functioning, core service.” It increases “patient flow” and “ensures privacy”.

But what about the woman wanting to continue a pregnancy or considering adoption? The only information comes from an admittedly biased source, Students for Life, who posed as conflicted or undecided My Options clients.

They found that the counsellors repeatedly advised clients to contact abortion-providing GPs for their first consultation, even when clients said they were unsure about wanting an abortion. There were no, or limited and inadequate discussions of other options.

Ethical research on this issue, perhaps based on anonymised, randomly selected recordings of clients secured with proper permissions, would establish whether Students for Life are correct.

What is free about choosing abortions when abject poverty is the only other option?

Unless the State is engaging in a little disingenuous counselling of its own by automatically jumping to provide abortion information, no one would have anything to fear from such research.

For women deciding to continue a pregnancy, there are no State-funded counselling organisations with a pro-life perspective. This is unsurprising, given that Donnelly has not met a single pro-life organisation during the three-year review process.

Allegedly free choices are somewhat of a myth anyway, as SVP told us this week that, regarding energy deprivation, one-parent families are worst off, with more than one in five households unable to heat their homes properly and many also unable to provide food.

What is free about choosing abortions when abject poverty is the only other option? The housing crisis probably pushes more women into abortion than anything else. We don’t know.

We don’t collect data on that or, unlike the UK, even count abortion figures properly. Even abortion providers admit we don’t count abortions properly but they think that’s unnecessary.

Google was a good friend to pro-choice organisations, which rejoiced when Google banned abortion campaign ads in the immediate run-up to the 2018 referendum.

Instead of cosying up to Google and spending tens of millions on abortion, the State might honestly research whether its own policy failures have created a dystopian reality rather than a paradise of free choice.