90% of Doctors in Ireland Refuse to Kill Babies in Abortions

International   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Apr 28, 2022   |   3:39PM   |   Dublin, Ireland

Irish doctors continue to resist pressure from abortion activists and government leaders to abort unborn babies as part of their medical practices.

Four years after Ireland legalized abortion, just 10 percent of its general practitioners do abortions, according to the Irish Examiner.

That means 90 percent of doctors reject the idea that aborting an unborn baby is health care. Most of these doctors likely recognize that unborn babies are valuable second patients along with their mothers.

This has made abortion activists very angry, and they claim that doctors are refusing to do abortions for a very different reason.

During a recent Oireachtas health committee meeting, Alison Spillane of the Irish Family Planning Association told lawmakers that doctors are not doing abortions because they are afraid of getting in trouble with the law, according to the report.

Ireland voted to legalize abortion in 2018. Now, abortions are legal for any reason up to 12 weeks of pregnancy and up to six months in a wide variety of circumstances. The law also forces taxpayers to pay for abortions and strictly limits conscience protections for medical professionals.

However, Spillane argued that doctors still fear prosecution because the law has restrictions on late-term abortions.

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“Further along when you’re looking at cases around foetal anomaly or risk to health, the potential of criminalisation hangs over medical practitioners,” she said, according to the Examiner.

Here’s more from the report:

Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane described this as shocking while People Before Profit TD Bríd Smith said 90% of medics not providing basic healthcare “really jumps out at you”. …

[Orla O’Connor, director of the National Women’s Council,] told Fine Gael health spokesperson Colm Burke that one clause is “very problematic” and has caused “huge heartbreak”. That stipulates that around fatal foetal anomalies doctors must be sure the baby will die within 28 days.

Pro-abortion activists also have been lobbying lawmakers to get rid of the limited conscience protections altogether – in other words, force doctors to abort unborn babies. Last year, O’Connor told the Irish Times lawmakers must ensure “that conscientious objection can never prevent women and pregnant people from accessing urgent healthcare.”

Abortions are not “urgent” health care – or health care at all – and some medical workers have been standing strong against abortion in Ireland.

In 2019, Dr. Trevor Hayes and three other OB-GYNs at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kilkenny said they “decided unanimously” not to perform abortions at their hospital.

Hayes said pro-abortion political leaders will create a major health crisis if they bully medical professionals into performing abortions, because many will quit rather than kill an unborn child, Kilkenny Now reported at the time.

“If this means that doctors and nurses and other medical professionals are being forced out of medicine, this will only add to the staffing crisis already crippling the health service,” he said. “Abortion is not life-saving. It’s life-ending. It’s not health care, and no amount of spin can make it health care.”

Thousands of unborn babies have been aborted in Ireland since the country legalized abortion. In 2020 alone, the government reported 6,577 abortions, according to the Examiner.