The Aadam's Women's Centre is the pregnancy counselling agency at the centre of the Baby A case.
The High Court has allowed the agency to be identified by The Irish Times following an application to Mrs Justice McGuinness by the newspaper.
The Aadam's agency is the final point of contact for a series of telephone numbers attached to counselling services advertising in the Golden Pages under the "family planning" heading. The spelling of the agency sometimes occurs as Addams. Similar advertisements appear in the directory's "pregnancy testing" section. Some of the advertisements specifically offer crisis pregnancy counselling. The Aadam's Women's Centre has an advertisement taking up most of a page under the "family planning" section of the current directory, and a smaller one under pregnancy. It also has advertisements in the Golden Pages section of all the regional directories.
The display advertisement says: "Unplanned Pregnancy? Full counselling on all options" and lists Dublin, London and Birmingham, with phone numbers for the three cities. The services it lists include pregnancy alternatives, safe sex, post-abortion counselling, and morning-after service. The advertisement gives the impression that the agency offers referral to Britain, which could be understood by many readers to mean an abortion clinic. The advertisement for the Aadam's agency differs from most of the other family planning advertisements in that it has no address, only a telephone number.
At least two other agencies, listed with phone numbers but no addresses and offering an apparently similar service, put callers in contact with people who provide appointments for counselling at one house in a Dublin suburb. This address is listed among a number of "pro-life counselling services" advertised on the website of a regionally-based antiabortion organisation. Described as the "Women's Counselling Network", its phone number and address are the same as those linked to the Aadam's agency, and one of the phone numbers in the Golden Pages leads to a US-based service which refers callers to this group and phone number.
Other services listed on the website include organisations like Cura and Life which have no association with the Aadam's agency.
According to the website, the Women's Counselling Network describes itself as follows: "We are a crisis pregnancy centre, which advertises in a pro-woman manner, thus attracting abortion-vulnerable women.
"Mothers ring us for pregnancy counselling; we invite them to see a counsellor who then puts all the facts before them in a gentle, loving manner. All of these mothers are abortion minded when they first contact us.
"The mother usually decides either during the counselling, or some days later, against the abortion. Sometimes it takes two or even three visits before the mother will make the final decision to let her baby live."
It is not stated what these "two or even three visits" which lead to the mother deciding to "let her baby live" entail. However, for some time now there has been concern among certain pregnancy counsellors about the condition in which some girls have come to them following a visit to this agency. The girls have been described as extremely distressed, having been made to watch explicit anti-abortion videos.
In the recent Baby A case, the Aadam's agency claimed that its voluntary counsellors had provided help and advice to approximately 2,000 women since it was set up in 1995. It referred about 50 young women to one GP mentioned in the case. The Eastern Health Board is now seeking to contact these women.
The Aadam's agency still appeared to be operating after the delivery of the judgment in the Baby A case by Ms Justice Laffoy. In the judgment she described as "reprehensible" and "unlawful" the actions of the agency's proprietor in misleading the mother of Baby A by suggesting she could choose "private" adoption and that she was entitled to leave her baby with the proprietor and his wife. Ms Justice Laffoy granted a habeas corpus application to the Eastern Health Board which took Baby A back from the couple. Women taking calls to the Aadam's advertised phone numbers offered appointments for pregnancy counselling at its address when contacted last Saturday and Sunday. Callers to these numbers are not told that the counsellors are anti-abortion. On Friday a call to a different number led to an appointment at the same address. Asked if "all the options" would be discussed, the woman who took the call said: "You wouldn't believe the number of people who are suing abortion clinics in England because they are not given the full facts. The counselling is based on all the facts."
The Aadam's agency and linked phone numbers appear to be operating a deliberate strategy to attract women in crisis pregnancies who are contemplating abortion.
In this State there is no regulation of pregnancy or any other kind of counselling service. Ms Justice Laffoy was highly critical of the conflict of interest involved in the proprietor of a counselling agency seeking to privately adopt the baby of a young woman who had contacted the agency.
An earlier attempt by this man to adopt another baby, Baby B, is being investigated by the Garda who will send the file to the DPP.