Fury as site of first abortion ‘identified’
Harris: ‘It’s trying to incite harassment of women’
HEALTH Minister Simon Harris has condemned online posts that allegedly identified the site of the country’s first abortion.
Demonstrators gathered outside Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda yesterday morning after social media posts claimed that the hospital’s first abortion was due to take place there.
On Sunday evening a post on the Facebook page of Pro-Life Ireland read: ‘The first abortion in Our Lady of Lourdes hospital is scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning Monday 7.’ The group also claimed that priests in Drogheda had asked parishioners to pray that the woman concerned would ‘have a change of heart overnight and not go through with the procedure’.
Minister Harris said: ‘I find it pretty darn despicable that somebody would take to social media and endeavour to create a public conversation about an individual patient’s care.’ The Minister said that all legal health services should be ‘treated with absolute respect’ and that patient confidentiality ‘must be to the fore’.
‘I’ve spoken this morning to the director general about this and I know the HSE shares this view,’ he said. ‘We will defend and protect patient confidentiality for any woman, or indeed any citizen, accessing any health service. ‘The idea that people would, in my view, effectively try and incite harassment of women and
of healthcare staff through online discourse is despicable.’ Minister Harris added that such actions represented an effort to ‘drag us back to a pre-Repeal place. ‘That’s one place we’re not being dragged back to,’ he said, and warned against accepting such social media posts to be true. Deputy director general of the HSE Ann O’Connor said that the HSE would work to ensure that no confidential patient information had been, or would be, leaked from the health service. ‘The breach of any confidential information about any patient is not something we will support at all, so we will of course examine it,’ she said. ‘It is a quiet protest,’ demonstrator Charles Byrne said. ‘We are here because we believe hospitals need to be places of care through compassion,’ Mr Byrne added.