The body representing general practitioners made no specific submission to the Interdepartmental Working Group on Abortion, which is due to produce a Green Paper next month.
Instead, the Irish College of General Practitioners sent the group its training brochure drawn up following the passage of the Termination of Pregnancy Information Act in 1995.
Neither the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists nor any of the major maternity hospitals has offered submissions to the working group.
The chief executive of the ICGP, Mr Fionan O Cuinneagain, said the college contained a wide diversity of opinion on the subject of abortion. "As a body we operate within the law of the land, the rules of the Medical Council and the doctor's individual conscience," he said. "This document is as far as we're going."
He stressed the need for education, and said that this brochure was intended for the education of the college's own membership of 96 per cent of all GPs.
The document emphasises the need for pre and post-abortion care for women, and for the creation of an environment where women feel they can come forward and discuss the issue of a crisis pregnancy with their GP.
It says that doctors need to provide a more proactive approach to the provision of contraceptive information to their patients in order to help to reduce unplanned pregnancy and abortion.
"Many women by-pass their GPs when travelling for an abortion and receive no medical follow-up afterwards. That is a situation which the vast majority of GPs would like to change," Dr Michael Coughlan, the ICGP chairman, said in his introduction.
The manual stresses the importance of non-judgmental counselling from GPs, and in its guidelines to doctors with a conscientious objection to providing abortion information it cautions against attempting to discourage by unprofessional means the woman from seeking an abortion.
These would include using the consultation to condemn abortion on moral grounds; creating delays which increased the medical risk to the patient or withholding important records; threatening to withhold further care or make the woman's circumstances known to family, employers, friends or others; or inducing fear by "spurious information about services, methods, side-effects, future fertility, psychiatric illness etc.".
Among the submissions made to the working party was one from a US group, Catholics for a Free Choice, which argues that even in a predominantly Catholic country like Ireland laws governing access to abortion need not adhere to the official Catholic position.
The Catholic position was more complex than was generally understood, it said. "There is much room in Catholic theology for the acceptance of policies that favour access to the full range of reproductive health options, including contraception and abortion."
Citing the church's just-war ethic, it comments: "It is striking that the church permits, under certain circumstances, the taking of the life of a person, while forbidding the taking of all foetal life, even though it cannot state definitively that foetuses are persons."
