The Irish Medical Times has a report that the E112 form has been used to procure an abortion abroad. The E112 form allows a patient to apply for treatment in another EU country when there is likely to be an unacceptable delay in the person's own state. It came to public notice when RTÉ's Tommie Gorman used it to receive treatment for cancer in Sweden.
Details of the alleged use of this form to access an abortion are sketchy. Dr Juliet Bressan of Doctors for Choice, who was the source of the story, was unable to name the doctor involved, the county where he or she practises or the health board area.
Since operations costing less than €12,700 are the responsibility of a health board, the Department of Health has no knowledge of it. No representative of a health board has yet admitted that a termination was paid for abroad.
No doubt if an abortion was funded by tax-payers' money it will please some pro-choice advocates. It always strikes me as somewhat grotesque that the inability to access abortion is seen as a grave disadvantage, given that the outcome is that a child is born.
To equate it with the inability to access medical treatment, as though there was not a life involved, must require a degree of wilful blindness. There is a further contradiction in that feminists have done very valuable work in the last 30 years to counteract the notion that pregnancy is somehow a pathology. They are rightly angry at a male-dominated vision of pregnancy and childbirth which medicalises what is in 99 per cent of cases a normal event.
Yet such positive ideas break down once a pregnancy is unwanted. Then we are back to the idea that normal healthy pregnancy is in need of medical management, but in this case to end the life of the foetus. Now, apparently, like any sufferer of a disease, the bearer should be allowed to access treatment at the taxpayers' expense.
If the tortuous debate during the last abortion referendum showed anything, it is that women with difficult pregnancies and genuine health emergencies receive every possible treatment in Ireland. So if this termination is like 99.9 per cent of Irish terminations, it will have ended a healthy pregnancy.
Yet Dr Bressan, for example, declares herself annoyed that anyone should criticise the use of public money for this purpose. "What else would you spend it on? People should have access to the health service."
There have been comments to the effect that this EU provision will most benefit poor women who will now be able to have abortions. Is this the best we can offer poor women? What about putting taxpayers' money to more positive use? Children born in poor areas suffer serious disadvantage. The odds are stacked against their success in vital areas such as education, which has repercussions not just for individuals but for generations.
One or two prominent pro-choice people are also known for their concerns about in-equality, but to say that the inability to access abortion because of poverty is a denial of rights, is tantamount to suggesting that such children should not be born. This must be the most reactionary solution possible to poverty.
The Crisis Pregnancy Agency (CPA) has been charged with the responsibility of reducing the numbers seeking abortion. The difficulty of this task should not be under-estimated. The most important first step will be to clarify what the attitude of the CPA itself is to abortion. It should go without saying that there should be no element of coercion or manipulation of women tolerated.
It should also go without saying that abortion should not be seen as a neutral choice. Why bother setting up an agency to reduce numbers of abortions if abortion merely has the status of any other choice? The CPA has to be very clear that abortion is a very poor choice indeed because it usually signals a situation of where a woman is so desperate that the only way out is to end a developing life. The aim of the CPA, and of Irish society, should be to create conditions where choices other than abortion are accessible and supported.
Women themselves do not see abortion as if it were one equally meritorious decision among a number of choices. The Women and Crisis Pregnancy study says: "Few women framed the decision to abort in terms of competing rights." In recent times we have seen a young woman sue the NHS for emotional distress because she felt that she was not informed properly about possible negative outcomes from the termination which she had.
During the abortion referendum, we were repeatedly told that we needed to hear the voices of women. There are many women as distressed as the young woman in Britain who is taking the case against the NHS, but they have no forum to express their grief. Society is struggling to come to terms with the voices of others whose stories of abuse were repressed. It would be tragic if those for whom abortion has been a negative experience become another category of people whose stories we are unwilling to hear.
As the CPA begins the difficult task of sifting through the many submissions which they have received, it might be useful to focus on supporting best practice in Ireland and learning from the experience of other countries.
For example, there is a good model of crisis counselling and training in operation in Cura - why reinvent the wheel?
Some findings will be counter-intuitive. There is a naive feeling abroad that if only young people were better informed we would have fewer crisis pregnancies.
Several recent academic studies confirm what teachers had suspected - that conventional sex education, particularly where there is an emphasis on information with no attempt to promote standards and skills, is pretty much ineffective. Throwing contraception at the problem won't work.
Much, much more is needed, including an attempt to tackle the problems associated with single parenthood. Allowing people to access abortion abroad using form E112 is just exporting our problems. It permits us to close our eyes to the desperation which leads women to want to terminate, and lets us off the hook of motivating society to provide more humane answers than abortion.