Freedom of Disinformation

“I checked in the Golden Pages and there was the first advert, called British Alternatives. I was very devastated that I was in this situation [crisis pregnancy] and I was afraid of getting a doctor who was unsympathetic. I called them and told them I wanted an abortion and I needed to know how far along I was. They made an appointment for Saturday... the woman started to ask about adoption – I wanted to leave but didn’t feel that I could. She then put a video on for me and she left the room, it was ultrasound pictures and pictures of mothers. Then she came back and she put a model of a small foetus in my hand... told me to name my baby, asked me how I would feel if I killed the baby.”

Claire (29), whose surname is withheld to protect her identity, is one of many Irish women who have come into contact with unregulated crisis pregnancy agencies which manipulate women and promote an extreme anti-abortion agenda.
Her story is among a number of accounts of ‘rogue’ crisis pregnancy agencies contained in a hard-hitting new report on abortion and abortion information in Ireland by international watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Another woman, also called Claire, reported that the agency she attended “harassed me for a few weeks – they called every couple of days... I stopped answering withheld numbers. They would ask, ‘Is your baby still alive? Have you killed it yet?’”
Sinéad Ahern of pro-choice campaign group Choice Ireland went undercover to investigate what goes on at one such ‘rogue’ agency, the Abbey Women’s Centre at 50 Dorset Street. She pretended to be a 19-year-old student who was considering terminating her pregnancy.
Sinéad told Hot Press: “It looks like a normal GP’s surgery. It has a waiting room with three or four chairs in it, a radio on and leaflets around the place about everything from yeast infections to immunisation. There was one other woman in the waiting room when I came in and I was waiting about five or so minutes when another woman came out in floods of tears and ran onto Dorset Street. I was brought to a room in the basement of the building that had no windows, just a table, two chairs and a TV in the corner.”
In the course of her interview with a woman called Caroline, who described herself as a psychologist, Sinéad was given untrue, negative information about abortion – such as that she would be at a high risk of suffering a perforated uterus, developing an infection or ending up with a colostomy bag.
“She said most women who have abortions, if you’re lucky enough not to end up infertile because of it, if you have more kids you won’t be able to bond with them, you might end up abusing them. She said a lot of women who have abortions end up depressed or alcoholics.”
Sinéad was also shown a video of abortion procedures. Abbey Women’s Centre declined to comment when contacted by Hot Press.
There are no hard and fast figures about the number of women ‘rogue’ agencies come into contact with. But the director of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency – the State’s planning and co-ordinating body in this field – stated last July that its funded service providers had reported 67 cases over a nine-month period.

Regulation
There is no statutory regulation of crisis pregnancy services in Ireland. The only legal framework is the 1995 Regulation of Information (Services outside the State for Termination of Pregnancies) Act. But ‘rogue’ agencies like the Abbey Women’s Centre fall outside the scope of that act and so are completely unregulated.
Here’s why. There are three types of crisis pregnancy service in Ireland. Firstly, there are government-funded ‘two-option’ agencies like Cura and Life which, because of their stated Catholic ethos, only provide women with information on adoption and parenting.
If you want information about abortion, you have to go instead to a ‘three-option agency’ like the Well Woman Centres, which provide the names and addresses of abortion services in the UK and other jurisdictions, as well as information on adoption and parenting. The 1995 Act is concerned with restricting the information these agencies provide – it is illegal for an agency to advocate abortion or to make an appointment with an abortion clinic on behalf of a pregnant woman.
Under the 1995 Act, information provided must be truthful and objective and must fully inform the woman on all the options. But doctors and agencies which do not provide information about abortion fall outside the scope of the Act and so are not subject to any of those rules.
Like the two-option agencies, ‘rogue’ agencies have a Catholic ethos. But unlike Cura or Life, which simply do not talk to women about abortion, rogue agencies provide directive counselling – deliberately frightening and manipulating their clients with negative, misleading and untrue information about abortion.
And unlike the two-option agencies, they are not upfront about their anti-abortion ethos – quite the opposite. In the current edition of the Golden Pages (pictured), almost two entire pages are taken up by large, misleading display ads for two rogue agencies – Abbey Women’s Centre and Limerick- and Cork-based Ask Majella. Both give the impression of neutrality by using the terms ‘abortion’ and ‘all options’ in their advertisements; Ask Majella also claims to offer advice on emergency contraception.
Human Rights Watch has now called on the Crisis Pregnancy Agency to make formal complaints against ‘rogue’ agencies using Advertising Standards regulations.
The human rights group has also called on the state agency to develop guidelines regulating the provision of information relating to abortion, including a requirement that all information be based on sound medical and scientific principles. The Crisis Pregnancy Agency has also been called on to clearly identify those agencies that provide misleading, incomplete, or inaccurate information and keep a list on the internet.
But it’s unlikely that any of these recommendations will be implemented in the near future. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health told Hot Press there are “no plans to consider a regulatory licensing system in this area.” Rather, the approach adopted by the Crisis Pregnancy Agency (recently subsumed into the HSE due to cutbacks) is to raise the public profile of state-funded crisis pregnancy services through the high-profile ‘Positive Options’ advertising campaign.
The Crisis Pregnancy Agency has also launched a public awareness campaign entitled ‘Don’t Be Manipulated’, which highlights the existence of unreliable agencies (though without naming any).

Human rights
The Human Rights Watch report contains some pretty damning pronouncements on the Irish government’s record in this area. It is stated that “the Irish government routinely violates women’s human right to access health-related information.”
As well as failing to counter blatantly false information provided by unregulated agencies, the government fails to ensure access to adequate information about the circumstances when abortion is legal in Ireland (namely, when the mother’s life is danger, including through the risk of suicide).
“These failures not only violate women’s right to access health-related information and services, but ultimately their rights to health, physical integrity and equality and nondiscrimination.”
The report finds that barriers to information are higher in non-Irish and in resource-poor communities.
All of the women interviewed for the report identified cost of travel as their biggest concern once they had decided to have an abortion. The British Pregnancy Advisory Services charges €535 for an early medical abortion and €932 for an abortion preformed in late gestation. Travel, accommodation and other indirect costs such as loss of income can add up to a further €800 for the pregnant woman.
The report identifies a group it calls the ‘invisible women’ – those who see through their crisis pregnancy simply because they cannot afford an abortion.
The primary recommendation from HRW is that the government takes steps to ensure that Irish women have access to safe and legal abortion services within Ireland. That’s extremely unlikely to happen any time soon since it would involve a referendum. But the report’s interim recommendations relating to regulation and access to information fall within the law.
And in calling for crisis pregnancy services to be regulated, the HRW report joins a growing pile which includes numerous documents by the Crisis Pregnancy Agency itself.