Choice Ireland's Month of Action Against the WRC Continues

dublin | gender and sexuality | event notice Thursday July 03, 2008 22:55 by Spokesperson - Choice Ireland

Choice Ireland believes that vulnerable women in crisis pregnancies deserve help and support in coming to terms with the difficult choices they face in their situation – not the lies, bullying, and manipulation of the WRC. For this reason we are campaigning to have this rogue agency shut down and as part of this campaign we will be maintaining a presence outside it every Saturday this month of July. This Saturday we continue our protest outside the WRC. This protest raises awareness about the WRC's activities and prevents them from traumatising more women for as long as we are there. Choice Ireland is preparing for an oireachtas committee meeting to have rogues agencies like this regulated and we will be collecting signatures for a petition to support this. We hope that you can offer us your support and help spread the word about what is going on. If you can't make it this Saturday then come along next Saturday or make a special effort to get to our big demo on Saturday the 26th of July.

Some Background information:

A rogue agency is a fraudulent pregnancy counselling service set up with the sole aim of taking advantage of the vulnerability of women experiencing a crisis pregnancy in order to bully them out of considering the possibility of abortion.

The WRC is located at number 50 on Upper Dorset Street. The sign above the door reads “WRC” but this rogue agency has many aliases. It was known as “Aadams” from 1995 until 1999 when that incarnation was shut down in the midst of an illegal adoption scandal. It reopened as the “Women's Counselling Network” and was more recently calling itself “Alpha” until a Newstalk exposé led it to change its name once more to the “WRC”. This agency is also known to misleadingly advertise in the yellow pages as “British Alternative Pregnancy Services” and “Choice for Women” in order to give the false impression that they will discuss all the options available to women in crisis pregnancy when they have no intention of doing so.

The agency uses many names because it has a lot to hide. This agency specialises in traumatising vulnerable women. They give medically incorrect information to women about abortion, stating that abortion causes breast cancer, child abuse, depression, fridgitity, promiscuity and infertility. They also have told women that have been raped that it is impossible to become pregnant from rape. None of this is true and the only reason they tell women these lies is to try to impede their abilitiy to make an informed decision. They have also been known to breach the confidentiality of people seeking counselling – informing family members without consent that a woman is pregnant and may be considering an abortion, giving a woman's contact details to priests, and posing as a boyfriend to try and persuade a clinic to cancel an appointment for abortion.

The agency promises women that they will be given contact details for abortion clinics in England as soon as they have had an unnecessary and expensive ultrasound at a private clinic that may take several weeks to procure. When the woman returns with her ultrasound scans the clinic then uses the images to try and talk her out of her decision once more. The reason they engage in such a tactic is to try and cause a woman additional delay and expense in the hope that this will prevent her from being able to procure an abortion.