The Master of the Coombe, Dr Sean Daly, called for measures to prevent unwanted pregnancies leading to abortion.
He said the vast majority of abortions were because of an unwanted pregnancy. "By improving sex education, and making contraception more widely available, we should be able to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. Clearly, a lot of effort should be put into that.
"This is a much easier problem to prevent than, ultimately, to manage. If that was grappled with more aggressively, we could reduce the number of women who would look to terminate a pregnancy."
Dr Daly added that he believed society owed "a duty of care" to the 5,000 women who left the State annually to have abortions.
"Frequently, we end up dealing with the complications of the termination of pregnancy. Often, the facilities in which the termination of a pregnancy takes place are not the best. There is no follow-up care, which is a real problem."
Senator Denis O'Donovan (FF) suggested the Republic was as advanced as any country in Europe and the United States in contraceptive methods. The social stigma which attached to a single woman becoming pregnant in the 1950s and 1960s was now more or less gone.
Dr Daly said there might have been a shift in social attitudes, "but if it is as good as you are saying, we would not have 5,000 women going to the UK every year for abortions". He added that while the same contraceptive methods were available in the State as existed in any other country in the first world, there was clearly a problem.
He agreed with Senator O'Donovan that the introduction of abortion legislation similar to the UK would "open the floodgates", and lead to many abortions in the State "for reasons that some of us might feel very uncomfortable about".
He added that while working in the US, he would hear of the same people coming in again and again for the termination of a pregnancy.
"Expressing purely my own opinion here, I would have difficulty with that. When you do an ultrasound at 12 or 14 weeks, you can see a lot of the foetus and the baby, and I would not favour a situation existing here that exists in the UK."
