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DUBLIN, July 26, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Irish Senator Jim Walsh has defended himself in an op-ed in the Irish Times after he was attacked by fellow politicians for giving a brutally honest description of the abortion procedure in the Senate while it was considering a bill to legalize abortion.

Walsh had been accused of using “oral porn” in his speech, by Ivana Bacik, a Labor Senator and one of her party’s most vocal abortion campaigners. Bacik blasted Walsh for the speech, calling it “scaremongering” and “unfortunate.”

“I make no apology for using graphic descriptions of abortion during the committee stage in the Seanad,” Walsh said today. “If my descriptions were horrific and ‘disgusting,’ what does that say about the procedure itself, a procedure that we are set to legalize?”

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The bill passed both upper and lower houses and is now awaiting the signature of President Higgins.

“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,” he said in today’s edition of the Irish Times.

Walsh also chastised media for its one-sided coverage: “When a Senator last week described babies with a fatal fetal 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 apologize to the families of babies who were born with this condition and loved for as long as they lived?” he asked.

In his Senate speech, Walsh was quoting the testimony of former U.S. abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino to a Congressional hearing in May 2012:

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The first instrument you reach for is a French suction catheter. Picture yourself introducing this catheter through the cervix and instructing the circulating nurse to turn on the suction machine. What you will see is a pale yellow fluid that looks like urine coming through the catheter into a glass bottle on the suction machine. This is amniotic fluid that surrounded the baby to protect her.

With suction complete, look for your sopher clamp. This instrument is for grasping and crushing tissue. When it gets hold of something, it does not let go. A second-trimester D&E abortion is a blind procedure. The baby cannot be seen in any orientation inside the uterus. Picture yourself reaching in with the sopher clamp and grasping anything you can.

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Walsh, a Fianna Fail Senator, said he was not surprised by the strong reaction to his speech by some of the abortion-promoting TDs and ministers. “The unborn have neither a voice nor a vote, so if those of a pro-life ethos do not articulate the protection of their innocent, vulnerable status, their cause is conceded, to the shame of humanity.”

Health Minister, Dr. James Reilly, who was a primary backer of the government’s abortion legislation, accused Walsh of using inflammatory language. “I find it regrettable that Senator Walsh has engaged in dramatic – and what some people would describe as offensive and upsetting – descriptions of procedures which do not take place in this country and will not be taking place in this country,” he said.

But replied that he had merely wanted to clarify what, exactly, was being proposed by the bill that passed rapidly through both houses of Parliament. The answers Reilly had given to the question, he said, “were far from reassuring.”

“Inexcusably, he was unable to confirm what abortion procedures will be allowed,” he said. “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.”

“The vast majority of media commentary,” Walsh continued, “has simply repeated the government spin that its abortion legislation is ‘extremely restrictive’ and has written off any contrary position as scaremongering.” For the first time in Irish history, despite the claims by the government that it does not change but rather clarifies the law, the “Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act” will allow direct abortion, and through all nine months of pregnancy if the mother claims to be suicidal.

Walsh said that the “debate has been dominated by sanitized half-truths and comforting fictions.

One of these fictions is that the Bill is ‘restrictive.’”

He explained that what legislators in Ireland were not told was that abortion laws in jurisdictions around the world have been liberalized by exactly the same method. Introducing “limited” abortion legalization with various “restrictions” and “safeguards,” has ultimately been interpreted through the courts to become effective, or explicit, abortion on demand.

He said that he was also trying to spare women from experiencing the suffering of post-abortion trauma. Women he had met with, he said, had “pleaded” with TDs 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.”