Cora Sherlock says reporting of latest Irish Times poll "gross distortion" in letter to the paper

Cora Sherlock with Reggie Littlejohn of Women's Rights Without Frontiers and
Joe McCarroll of the Pro Life Campaign at an event in 2012. 

In a letter in today's Irish Times, Cora Sherlock, the Deputy Chairperson of the Pro Life Campaign says that the Irish Times' presentation of the recent poll "was a gross distortion of the true picture". 

Reporting on the poll at the time of its release, Stephen Collins, the Political Editor of the Irish Times, claimed that public support on abortion has increased from 23% in 1997 to 71% today. As Cora points out, in reality the poll in 1977 found that 77% of people supported abortion (given the question made no distinction between abortion and necessary medical treatments during pregnancy). In responding to Cora's letter in today's paper, Stephen Collins dismisses her point, claiming that his comparison still stands. 

Below is Cora's letter in full. 

Sir, – The presentation by The Irish Times of the latest Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll on abortion was a gross distortion of the true picture.
In his analysis, Political Editor, Stephen Collins (February 11th) states that public support for Oireachtas legislation on abortion has risen from 23 per cent in 1997 to 71 per cent today.
The 1997 MRBI poll he cites actually found 77 per cent of people supported abortion in a variety of circumstances, depending on how the question was asked. The 23 per cent mentioned by Mr Collins was just one of the findings in a multiple choice question that included other options.
Five years later, in 2002, when the electorate had an actual choice to make in a referendum, 49 per cent voted Yes to row back on the X case ruling. An IMS poll conducted just afterwards found an additional 5 per cent voted No on pro-life grounds.
In other words, despite findings like the one cited by Mr Collins from 1997 and the latest Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll, when the people have an actual democratic choice, a clear majority rejects abortion.
Polls showing high levels of support for abortion are nothing new. Whenever the question suppresses the distinction between induced abortion (that targets the life of the baby) and necessary medical treatments to preserve the life of the mother (where every reasonable effort is made to save the life of the baby), the results show high support for abortion.
Such polls, however, significantly under-represent the opposition among the electorate and create an inflated perception of the extent of public support for abortion.
– Yours, etc,
CORA SHERLOCK,
Deputy Chairperson,
Pro Life Campaign,
Lower Baggot Street,
Dublin 2.

Stephen Collins writes: The Irish Times poll in December 1997 found that 23 per cent of people felt the government should legislate for abortion in line with decisions made in the courts. Other findings in the same poll or other polls about the complex issue do not alter that fact. The finding in the latest poll that 71 per cent of people favour legislation is directly comparable.

Ireland is safe, despite the propaganda

David Quinn, in the Irish Independent. On the Independent's site here. 

IN the debate about abortion we are constantly dealing with what can only be described as 'asymmetrical hysteria', that is we are only ever outraged by anti-abortion laws and their consequences and never by the consequences of pro-abortion laws.

The result of this 'asymmetrical hysteria' is that public opinion is constantly being pushed to favour more liberal abortion laws rather than more restrictive ones.

Indeed, we are conditioned to believe that laws against abortion are the result of irrational dogmas that are placing women's lives at risk.

Thus we now think that if only we were more like our more 'rational' next-door neighbour, Britain, Savita Halappanavar would be alive today.

In fact, it is impossible to know that, and certainly not before the completion of the investigation into her death.

In the meantime, what we do know is that the Irish maternal death rate is one of the very lowest in the world at roughly three women per 100,000. The British figure is four times higher at 12 per 100,000 and the US figure is eight times higher at 24 per 100,000.

How is it that Ireland without abortion is so much safer for pregnant women than Britain and America, which both have highly liberal abortion laws?

The above data has been obtained from 'Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2008', which has been developed by the World Health Organisation, the UN and the World Bank.

However, thanks to the highly tendentious coverage of the tragic case of Mrs Halappanavar, particularly by RTE, most Irish people probably believe that Ireland is a particularly dangerous place for women to have a baby.

This notion, now commonplace and gaining worldwide traction, is actually a gross calumny against our country.

Our politicians ought to defend the medical record of this country and point out that our maternal healthcare system is superb at bringing babies to full term without compromising the lives or health of their mothers.

We would also do well to point out how the dogmas behind the abortion laws of other countries cost lives.

For example, in Britain, how many babies are unnecessarily aborted because a doctor erroneously imagines that the only way to save the mother is to abort the baby?

What kind of dogma makes some of us think that 190,000 abortions in England and Wales each year is 'normal', meaning that one pregnancy in every four ends in a termination?

What dogma leads abortion clinics to think 'gendercide' is okay, namely the killing of an unborn child simply because it is the 'wrong' sex, usually a girl?

The 'Daily Telegraph' discovered in a sting operation earlier this year that sex-selective abortions take place in UK abortion clinics.

What kind of dogma thinks it is okay to abort a child simply because the child has Down's Syndrome or cystic fibrosis?

In Ireland, a service is now on offer which allows couples to have their embryos screened to ensure they are in no way 'defective'. This is eugenics and it is common practice today.

None of the scandals just listed ever causes anything like the outrage generated by the hard cases an anti-abortion law will cause from time to time.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that they do not attract anything like the same publicity and so most of us are completely unaware of them.

The second reason is a dogmatic attachment to the ideology of 'choice', which causes many of us to simply turn a blind eye to the innumerable scandals caused by abortion laws.

We must not allow ourselves to be conditioned by ceaseless one-sided propaganda into thinking our law on abortion is inhumane and unjust.

The truth is that our law with respect both to mother and child is far more humane than in other Western countries, including Britain, and we should be very proud of that.

Ireland's abortion laws: we need to get the facts straight

Dr. Tim Stanley writing in the Telegraph. Click here for the article on the Telegraph's site. 

This post is neither for nor against legalised abortion – it’s simply about laying out the facts of a very tragic story.

On October 21, Savita Halappanavar visited Galway University Hospital, Ireland. The 31-year-old dentist was 17 weeks pregnant and suffering terrible back pain. Savita was told that she was having a miscarriage, so she requested an abortion. The doctors denied her request because they said that they detected a foetal heartbeat and that Irish law ruled out a termination. Savita’s pain continued for three days and she eventually died of septicaemia.

Inevitably, this awful story has prompted demands for a rethink of Ireland’s abortion laws. That’s understandable and will almost certainly happen. Ireland has been liberalising for decades; Irishness and Catholic conservatism are no longer as synonymous as they once were. The European Court of Human Rights 2010 ruling on abortion gives Taoiseach Enda Kenny good legal grounds for a review of the law, and Kenny has branded himself as a critic of the privileged status of Catholicism in Ireland. Change will probably come.

But some would dispute whether or not Savita’s death is an appropriate catalyst for that change. In Ireland, it actually is legal to induce a birth when a mother’s life is at risk. Eilís Mulroy notes the following:

The decision to induce labour early would be fully in compliance with the law and the current guidelines set out for doctors by the Irish Medical Council. Those guidelines allow interventions to treat women where necessary, even if that treatment indirectly results in the death to the baby. If they aren't being followed, laws about abortion won't change that. The issue then becomes about medical protocols being followed in hospitals and not about the absence of legal abortion in Ireland.

Because Savita's case is under investigation, Mulroy asks questions but, wisely, avoids inferring answers: why, in this instance, did the hospital not induce (as it could and should) and is its decision not to induce reflective of a wider institutional failure?

It is possible that new legislation is necessary to clarify the existing medical consensus. But it does not logically follow that Ireland needs a total rethink of its entire approach to abortion that brings it in line with Europe’s essentially pro-choice culture. Aside from the specific medical case for abortion in Savita’s situation, inducing labour to save her life would not necessarily have conflicted with Catholic moral teaching, either. In 1951, Pope Pius XII explicitly ruled that such a procedure “can be lawful.” If it is true, as the Halappanavar family claims, that the Galway doctors said they would not provide a termination because "this is a Catholic country", then they got their theology unforgivably wrong.

Savita Halappanavar’s death demands investigation and answers. Aside from giving justice to her family, the implications of any investigation for the wider abortion debate are so wide-ranging that it is crucial that we get the facts unbiased and 100 per cent accurate. Alas, such objectivity is not always applied when it comes to media reporting of the Irish and/or Catholic approach to abortion. Indeed, much of it is misleading and unhelpful.

Media rushes to judge but we don't know facts

The British media, in tandem with the Irish, is running with the 'woman dies because she was denied abortion' story headline.

It's not surprising that the likes of 'The Guardian' would give the story prominence because 'The Guardian' is fiercely pro-abortion.

In Britain it fits in with a certain stereotype of this country to believe that women are dying here because of our lingering adherence to Catholic medical ethics.

However, even the more pro-life 'Daily Telegraph' and 'Daily Mail' have given the story prominence.That would be justified if we knew that Savita Halappanavar did indeed die because she was denied an abortion, but that is not why she died.

We know this because if there was a need to end her pregnancy in order to save her life, then the hospital was free to do that. Nothing in law was preventing the hospital from doing so.

And to be absolutely clear, ending a woman's pregnancy prematurely is not necessarily the same thing as abortion.

For example, inducing labour where it is necessary to save the life of the mother is not the same as abortion and Irish hospitals induce labour in these circumstances on a regular basis.

From the available facts, we know that Mrs Halappanavar was miscarrying and that she died within days of being admitted to hospital from septicemia and E Coli ESBL.

We do not know for certain whether ending the pregnancy upon her arrival in the hospital would have saved her life, but to repeat, if medical staff needed to do that they could have done it.

Therefore the 'woman dies because she was denied abortion' storyline is simply not true. The 'woman dies because of Catholic opposition to abortion' is also not true.

We simply do not know for certain at this stage whether Mrs Halappanavar would have died no matter what was done. This is what the investigation into her death will ascertain.

And we must also repeat for the umpteenth time that Ireland has one of the lowest maternal death rates in the world. It is lower than the British rate where abortion is available on demand.

In addition, it is necessary to remind ourselves that sometimes women die because of botched abortions in legal settings. Indeed, last year a doctor – Phanuel Dartey – was struck off in Britain because he nearly killed an Irish woman while performing an abortion on her in a Marie Stopes Clinic in the UK.

This story received remarkably little publicity here in Ireland. RTE did not cover it at all, whereas it has given the Savita Halappanavar story wall-to-wall coverage. Why this discrepancy?

And by what journalistic calculus did RTE decide to give so little coverage to the revelation by this newspaper that some staff at pregnancy crisis agencies in Ireland are giving women dangerous and illegal advice? It would be good to know.

There has been a tremendous and unseemly rush to judgment in this case.

It is being used to advance the argument that Ireland must change its law on abortion before we know the full facts.

It is also being used to falsely and unjustly give the impression that Ireland is an unsafe place for pregnant women when the opposite is true.

The bottom line is that we cannot draw any decisive conclusions about what happened in this tragic case until we do know all the facts.

Appointment of abortion campaigner as Director General of HSE sends wrong message

Today Tony O'Brien was appointed the new Director General of the HSE by The Minister for Health James Reilly.  Mr O'Brien was previously the Chief Executive of the Irish Family Planning Association and a leading campaigner for abortion in Ireland.

Commenting on the Minister for Health’s latest appointment Cora Sherlock, Deputy Chairperson of the Pro Life Campaign, said:

“Ever since the Clare Daly Bill on abortion, Minister Reilly has been effectively relying on the speaking notes of the pro-abortion movement rather than defending Fine Gael’s pre-election pro-life commitments.

Now he has appointed someone as Director General of the HSE who has spent most of his career campaigning for abortion on demand in Ireland. The political message sent by this appointment is unmistakable. Whether it’s the issue or the optics, clearly Minister Reilly doesn’t get it.

Of more concern, however, to pro-life supporters is the manner in which the Expert Group process initiated by the Minister is descending into farce.

Both Minister Reilly and Minister of State Kathleen Lynch have already made public statements pre-empting its findings and it will come as no surprise if it reports back with a narrow list of options all advocating abortion. If this happens, it will have nothing to do with women’s health or the right to life and everything to do with politics.”

Honest debate necessary to address real issues sorrounding Abortion in Ireland

The way in which the Irish Examiner presented the result of a RED C online survey on abortion published on 21st January was misleading and did not make an honest contribution to the debate on abortion in Ireland.

The poll claiming that 60% of 18-35 year olds support legalised abortion in Ireland was presented by the Irish Examiner in a misleading way on its front page on

Given the question posed, the results were not at all surprising. The survey made no distinction between necessary medical treatments in pregnancy and induced abortion, (where the life of the unborn child is directly targeted). This in effect renders the findings meaningless and sheds no new light on public attitudes to abortion.

Polls, including one in 2009, that distinguish between standard medical treatments and induced abortion consistently show majority opposition to legal abortion according to Millward Brown IMS market research 2005-2009. and 2009

The Red C survey confined its interviews to 18-35 year olds. Clearly then the findings are not representative of the general population. Also, only 36% of the 18-35 year olds interviewed 'strongly' approve of legal abortion and not 60% as the Irish Examiner claimed.

The report also failed to draw attention to the known fact that 18-35 year olds start to increasingly identify with the pro-life position as they get older. This is borne out in all surveys on the issue.

All things considered, it was extremely misleading for the paper to run with today's front page headline declaring: 60% In Favour of Legal Abortion

The abortion debate is a very serious one and deserves more objective treatment than it received in the Irish Examiner.