Irish Catholics Lying For Jesus

Irish doctors respond to the advice given in controversial abortion clinic video

An undercover pair of reporters for the Irish edition of the Times has exposed the systematic lies being told to vulnerable pregnant women seeking safe, confidential and accurate abortion advice.

The Women's Centre, Berkeley Street, Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, which poses as an independent advice centre but which is in reality a front for a Catholic anti-abortion group, was visited by the two reporters, Ellen Coyne and Catherine Sanz, pretending to be pregnant. They used concealed cameras to filmed the session. The report regretably sits behind a paywall so this blog post draws on other sites which report on its contents.

They were told:

Taken from the Abortionadvice.ie website.

• The ovaries and breasts are connected so when a pregnancy is terminated, it can cause breast cancer.
• An abortion can harm a woman's reproductive system.
• Women who have had abortions may go on to abuse their other children.
• The abortion pill can't be used after the 6th week of pregnancy.
• Abortions often lead to the death of the woman having the abortion.
• UK abortion clinics can give you infections so only the group's centres should be used.

All of these are wrong or grossly misleading. As doctors from Doctors For Choice, an Irish organisation that campaigns for reform of Irish abortion laws, pointed out:

The videoed "information" given to a young woman who presented herself as pregnant to a Dublin "advice" clinic is entirely untrue and dangerous. International medical guidelines state that the abortion pill can be prescribed up to at least 9 weeks in pregnancy. Furthermore there is no reputable published research and no medical evidence for an increased risk of breast cancer or psychological sequelae from abortion, when compared to women who have completed pregnancies. To suggest that women who have had abortions are more likely to perpetrate child abuse is to heap insult on top of the stigma already imposed on the more than 100,000 women who have been forced to leave Ireland to access safe legal abortion services.

Irish women deserve access to safe, legal abortion, regulated as are other medical services. They deserve evidence-based, unbiased information provided in a setting where basic first principles regarding counselling apply - where there is no agenda regarding the decisions they reach and the advice is non-directive.

Berkeley Street, Dublin, 2014

Abortions are illegal under the Irish Constitution unless as the result of medical intervention to save the life of the mother. Although there is a constitutional right to obtain information about abortion services in other jurisdictions, abortion advice centres such as this are completely unregulated, so luring unsuspecting, vulnerable women into them to be fed lies, misinformation and propaganda is perfectly legal in the Republic of Ireland. They are not regulated by medical or other professional ethical standards.

Prior to disguising itself as an independent advice center, this militant pro-life group set up shop adjacent to a family planning clinic in Berkeley Street and harangued women using the service with unwanted 'advice'. They now seem to have decided to be a little more subtle which means pretending not to be an overtly Catholic front organisation.

Although the Bible does not explicitly forbid the telling of lies and the ninth Commandment only forbids bearing false witness against a neighbour, this is generally held to be a general prohibition on telling lies. This Catholic group however seems to feel exempt from this fundamental piece of Christian 'morality'. Presumably, they would expect Jesus to tell lies too if the truth wasn't what he wanted it to be or what he wanted people to hear.

'via Blog this'

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