The Phoenix Girls’s Centre in Tralee has welcomed the Authorities’s new free contraception scheme for ladies aged 17–25 however say the age restrict ought to be prolonged.

s of September 14, service suppliers together with GPs, pharmacies, major care centres, household planning centres and scholar well being clinics will likely be signing contracts with the HSE to supply companies below the scheme.

The price of offering a variety of contraceptive choices presently out there to medical card holders will now be out there via the scheme.

These will embody contraceptive injections, implants, the contraceptive patch and ring, and varied types of oral contraceptive tablet, together with emergency contraception.

Minister for Well being Stephen Donnelly stated the scheme is funded by a €9 million allocation from Finances 2022. It’s thought the scheme will help ladies who’re susceptible and low-income earners.

Chairperson of the Phoenix Girls’s Centre, Rita O’Sullivan, desires the scheme broadened to incorporate ladies in older age teams.

“It’s a constructive step. We’d be very happy and the hope is it will be prolonged to all ladies that require it, not simply the acknowledged age teams,” stated Ms O’Sullivan.

“Nobody is aware of what it’s taking place in anybody’s life. Our view on the Phoenix Centre is that this is a welcome first step. However you don’t know who’s economically constrained now. That’s why the age standards ought to be prolonged,” she added.

Minister Donnelly’s resolution is seen as a seismic shift within the historical past of ladies’s rights and their skill to supply contraception.

In 1935, the State prohibited the sale and use of contraception, whereas within the early Seventies members of the Irish Girls’s Liberation Motion bought condoms in Belfast and introduced them by prepare to the Republic, the place the importation and sale of contraceptives was banned.

However some have criticised the brand new legislation saying it equates to a waste of public spending, citing an absence of proof that free contraception reduces undesirable pregnancies.

Nonetheless, Ms O’Sullivan believes any societal judgement must be faraway from what is actually a ladies’s well being challenge.

“The judgement must be taken out of this and let ladies make the selection for themselves and be supported by having contraception made extra accessible and freer,” she stated.

“Individuals judging different folks is what the issue has been up to now. The saying ‘stroll in my sneakers earlier than judging me’ nonetheless applies.”