Twelve women a day travelled from the Republic to Britain for abortions last year, according to statistics published today.
Figures released by the UK Department of Health show a total of 4,402 women providing Irish addresses had terminations in England and Wales last year.
This was a drop of 20 on the year before, making it the ninth year in a row when the numbers travelling to Britain for abortions fell.
The majority of the women travelling were in their 20s and 30s. The HSE crisis pregnancy programme said preliminary figures showed the number of women giving Irish addresses at abortion clinics in the Netherlands also fell in 2010. The figures show they dropped from 134 in 2009 to 31 in 2010.
Niall Behan, chief executive of the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) said that since 1980 at least 147,881 women have travelled to Britain for abortion services. "These figures serve to highlight yet again the hypocrisy of Ireland's restrictive abortion laws and clearly demonstrate the necessity for domestic-based abortion services in Ireland," he said.
"Clients attending IFPA services for pregnancy counselling express frustration and anger that they have to leave this country to access health services they feel should be available to them at home. Women don't want sympathy, they simply want access to the health services they need," he added.
Last December, in a landmark judgement against the Irish State, the European Court of Human Rights acknowledged that travelling abroad for an abortion constituted a significant psychological, physical and financial burden on women. The court unanimously found that Ireland's abortion law violates women's human rights and that abortion, in certain circumstances, should be legally accessible in Ireland.
The Government must submit an action plan within the next month to the Council of Europe on how it intends to execute the judgement.