The debate over the Government’s abortion legislation “has been dominated by sanitised half-truths and comforting fictions” Fianna Fáil Senator Jim Walsh has said.

Writing in today’s Irish Times, Senator Walsh hit back at those who criticised his speech last week in which he described in graphic terms what happened during an abortion.

A range of political and media figures, including his party leader Michéal Martin and Tanáiste Eamon Gilmore, lined up to attack Senator Walsh over the speech, which was branded as “disgusting” by some commentators.

However Senator Walsh has refused to apologise for his remarks.

He said he made his comments in the context of trying to discover from Health Minister James Reilly what exact methods of abortion would be used under the new law.

Senator Walsh said “Inexcusably, he [Minister Reilly] was unable to confirm what abortion procedures will be allowed. All we know is the law he is bringing in permits terminations that are life-ending not life-saving. Indeed the abortion procedure is not in any way circumscribed.

“If my descriptions were horrific and ‘disgusting’, what does that say about the procedure itself, a procedure that we are set to legalise?”

Senator Walsh added that he did not seek to “add to the heartbreak of women who have been through the experience”.  

But he said that women from groups such as Women Hurt, which represent women whose lives damaged by abortion had pleaded with him and other members of the Oireachtas “to speak out about the devastating consequences of abortion and help end the spiral of silence about its brutality and what it inflicts on an innocent unborn child”.

He said that, in a democracy, it was “perfectly legitimate for commentators and others to attack my speech”.

However he added that “democracy functions better when all sides are scrutinised and criticised equally. That isn’t what is happening here”.

Senator Walsh said: “When a Senator last week described babies with a fatal foetal abnormality as ‘a cluster of cells which will develop into a large piece of tissue that will have no head, no brain, no spinal cord’, where was the outrage and condemnation from any newspaper?  

“Where was the demand to correct this misleading description or to apologise to the families of babies who were born with this condition and loved for as long as they lived?

“With the Government set to introduce abortion disguised as medical interventions, I believe that it is an appropriate time to describe the reality of what is being proposed.”