An ideology of total control over pregnancy and unborn children has been proposed by the state-funded National Women’s Council as a jurisprudential philosophy to undergird  further liberalisation of Simon Harris’ extreme abortion legislation.

In a submission released yesterday, the NWCI said they believe the effect of our abortion laws should be two-fold: “(1) to ensure safe, equitable, accessible and legal abortion for women, and (2) to institutionalise women’s autonomy over reproductive decision-making.”

Toward that end, the group called for changes to the bill including a preamble to indoctrinate future generations into a politics that paints the crusade for abortion as part “of the long fought for changes to protect women’s health.” This preamble would “serve to reflect Ireland’s past restrictive abortion laws and the legacy of how women have been treated in Ireland.” There is no mention of how unborn children unwanted by their parents are treated, nor how abortion abortion ends the lives of such children in a cruel and callous manner.

The submission also calls for a wider range of healthcare workers to be involved in abortion, that the law be so clear that doctors would never be ‘needlessly cautious’ in applying the criteria for abortion, and that conscience rights of medical personnel which they refer to as “so-called ‘conscientious objection’” would be carefully circumscribed so that no woman would ever be denied an abortion.