The Government does not pretend that abortions in the first three months of pregnancy will need a health ground in order for them to take place. This makes it even more misleading for Government spokespeople or pro-choice advocates to continually present abortion as a form of ‘treatment’. It is worth pointing out that about 90 percent of abortions take place during the first three months of pregnancy.
After 12 weeks, the proposed law will conform closely to the law in the UK, where a health ground must be offered as a justification for abortion, before and after 12 weeks. The ‘health ground’ can be physical or mental.
97pc of the almost 200,000 abortions which occur annually in the UK, take place under the ‘mental health’ ground.
In fact, these abortions are almost always for socio-economic reasons, something the Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution itself admits in its report published last December.