The number of women giving an Irish address when travelling to the UK for abortions fell in 2007, new figures showed today. According to the British department of health, 4,686 women who travelled to Britain for an abortion gave an Irish address in 2007, down from 5,042 for the previous year. This is the sixth year in a row that numbers have fallen.
Katharine Bulbulia, chair of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency said it was important to have a monitoring system in place to identify how many women were travelling to other jurisdictions for abortion procedures.
"It has emerged that the only other country that women are currently travelling to in significant numbers is the Netherlands. We will continue to monitor the numbers going to other jurisdictions into the future," she said.
Director of the CPA, Caroline Spillane, said the provision of free crisis pregnancy counselling had been expanded nationally by nearly 50 per cent since the agency was established in 2001, and had seen a marked takeup in the services.
"When the take-up of counselling is combined with the reduction in the number of women giving Irish addresses in UK abortion clinics, we can suggest that the increased awareness of crisis pregnancy and the services provided has
had an impact."
Dr Ruth Cullen of the Pro-Life Campaign welcomed the decrease in the figures, and refuted claims more Irish women opting for abortions in European countries.
"There is no statistical evidence to substantiate such claims. Holland is often cited as a country where more Irish women may be travelling to for abortions. However, official Dutch figures over the past 5 years show little variation in the number of abortions on foreign nationals," she said.
She said further measures needed to be taken to continue to reduce the rate of abortions, and said the CPA in particular had a responsibility to prioritise funding to recognised counselling agencies that provided alternatives to abortion.
The figures from Britain's department of health showed the number of abortions among under 14s rose by more than a fifth last year, to 163, while across all age groups, there was a 2.5 per cent rise in abortion numbers to 198,500.
