New numbers from the Irish Department of Health reveals that in 2024, 10,852 abortions were committed – the highest number on record since abortion was legalized in 2019.
“Irish voters were promised that abortion would be ‘safe and rare,’ but the numbers have now almost quadrupled – up from 2,879 women traveling in 2018 to a shocking, heart-breaking 10,852 babies killed by abortion in 2024,” Niamh Uí Bhriain of Life Institute told LifeSiteNews. Uí Bhriain, one of Ireland’s foremost pro-life leaders, spearheaded one of the key anti-abortion campaigns during the 2018 abortion referendum.
“How can this possibly be seen as ‘progress?’ At this stage, Ireland’s spiraling abortion rate has taken the lives of 55,000 babies. It’s the kind of death toll you only normally see in wars – because nothing can really normalize abortion, the deliberate ending of a human being before they are born.”
Uí Bhriain, a longtime pro-life campaigner, noted that the movement predicted this result. “What we’re seeing in Ireland is also what we see in every other country in the world: the media ignoring the horrific rise in abortion rates,” she said. “Not so much sticking their heads in the sand as deliberate deception or deception by omission – if they don’t talk about it, no one will even know it’s happening, never mind question it.”
As I detailed in my book Patriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement, the media played a key role in suppressing the truth during the 2018 referendum – and now, their modus operandi is the same. To report on Ireland’s skyrocketing abortion rate would be to de facto admit that the pro-life movement’s predictions just a few short years ago were both prescient and foreseeable.
“55,000 abortions is a grim and heartbreaking new record, and pro-life groups need to break through that media censorship to make the reality known, to ensure a real acknowledgement of, and debate around, these shocking abortion rates,” Uí Bhriain told LifeSiteNews.
It’s a fact that the government has failed to offer supports to women and to families and instead simply focuses endlessly on abortion access. The number of abortions jumped immediately to 6,666 in 2019 – but have now soared to almost 11,000 in 2024 – and we are literally aborting our future.
We’re at a point where abortion rates are soaring and birth rates are collapsing, yet the government is keeping no real data on why this is happening. This is a policy of wilfull indifference. The government needs to understand what’s driving women towards abortion and how we are failing both mother and child by too-often making abortion the only option.
Almost 11,0000 abortions a year is clearly a factor in the collapse in birth rates – with 7,000 fewer births in 2024 than in 2018, the year abortion was legalized. We’re being warned now that we won’t have enough people to pay for pensions, and that we need to boost immigration to build our workforce, yet the government and the media continues to turn a blind eye to the fact that we are literally aborting our own future and failing mothers and babies.
Every nation that legalizes abortion, as Uí Bhriain noted, inevitably normalizes abortion; add to that the fact that support for abortion becomes more entrenched due to a rapidly spreading web of involvement. Once tens of thousands of women have had abortions, a growing number of people have profoundly personal reasons for steadfastly denying an obvious and once undeniable truth: that abortion brutally ends the life of a child developing in the womb.
The task of the pro-life movement remains the same: to hold up a mirror to the culture, and to resolutely refuse to allow the silent victims of abortion to remain unseen and voiceless.