Not too long ago, when this newspaper interviewed a group of single mothers in Cherish, they were happy to talk about lone motherhood - but none was willing to be photographed.
None of these mothers chose abortion, yet their attitudes are directly relevant to the debate which today's publication of the all-party report will intensify.
That debate is likely to revolve around such issues as suicide, threats to health and the question of when life begins.
The mothers in Cherish, however, who chose to have their babies, saw the stigma of lone motherhood as a real force in Irish society and that force is one of the factors which led other women to choose abortion.
This is one of the clear findings in the report Women and Crisis Pregnancy, a research study by Ms Evelyn Mahon, Ms Catherine Conlon and Ms Lucy Dillon of Trinity College Dublin, published in 1998 by the Department of Health and Children.
It suggests that women choose abortion for reasons which have nothing to do with suicide and which usually have nothing to do with threats to their health.
These include, in the case of single women, fear of the stigma and shame which they will bring to themselves and their families if they become lone mothers.
As one of the report's authors, Ms Evelyn Mahon, has pointed out, lone mothers are frequently depicted in the media as welfare spongers. Indeed, she has gone so far as to say she has never seen the media depict lone parents in a positive way.
Stigma is alive and well - and it isn't nuns and priests who are keeping it going either.
Some women choose abortion because they believe they cannot afford financially to support a child. They may be in the early stages of education or a career and believe that, as Ms Mahon puts it, "their lives would effectively stop" if they had a child.
Some separated women, the study found, chose abortion because they felt their resources were already stretched as far as they possibly could be stretched when it came to looking after their children. Older women were worried about the effects of a pregnancy on their health.
And what of adoption? The numbers of women having abortions could more than meet the needs of those who want to adopt children.
In 1998, fewer than 100 children were offered for adoption - an all-time low. In that same year 5,891 women with Irish addresses had abortions in England.
There appear to be several reasons for this dramatic discrepancy.
One is that pregnant women who had abortions felt they would be unable to go through with an adoption if they brought the baby to full term. So if they were determined not to become mothers, there was one sure way to avoid that - to have an abortion. As one of the mothers in Cherish put it when asked why she thought people chose abortion over adoption: "I'm not saying a termination is quick and easy, but it's probably less heart-breaking than to carry a child and then give it up."
For those who felt a need to keep their pregnancy secret, adoption was also out of the question: they believed that if they went through with a pregnancy, their secret would be discovered.
As the debate on abortion goes on and intensifies, the numbers of women having abortions gets bigger all the time. In 1995, 4,532 women with Irish addresses had abortions in Britain. By last year, the number had risen to 6,226.
Provisional figures for the first three months of this year suggest 1,667 had abortions in that period.
A breakdown provided by the Minister for Health and Children to Ms Frances Fitzgerald TD shows that the biggest age group for abortions is women in their early 20s, women who are still in education or at the early stage of their working lives.
Girls under 16 accounted for only 28 abortions in 1996, the latest year for which a breakdown is available. Sixteen- to 19-year-olds had 738 abortions.
Teenagers might seem prime candidates for abortion, yet in that same year, 2,763 of them choose to give birth (last year 3,301 teenagers had babies.)