Simon Harris, it appears, will say anything that comes into his head to justify stripping the unborn of the right to life, even if what he says today contradicts what he said yesterday. His comments on the aborting of children with Down Syndrome is a case in point.

Last week, our Health Minister declared that it was “offensive to suggest women in Ireland are seeking abortion on the ground that their babies will be born with disabilities like Down Syndrome”.

Then, when it was pointed out to him a day or two later that 83 Irish women have had abortions in England for the precise reason that their babies had Down Syndrome, he declared: “I am not shocked by it at all”.

He stated: “It was wrong for others to put themselves in the shoes of a woman who has an abortion and pretend to know what is going on in her life or her mind and heart”.

So, one day he says the mere suggestion an Irish woman would abort a child with Down Syndrome is “offensive”, and the next day he says he is not shocked at all and who is to say why someone would do something like this?

In both cases, he is attempting to emotionally blackmail us. If you say that some women will abort a child with DS, it is “offensive”, and therefore you can’t suggest it. But then, when the facts are pointed out, what’s wrong is to point to those facts because doing so insults the women who opted for abortion in these circumstances.

Notice that in neither case has the Minister expressed the slightest qualm about aborting babies with DS. He raises no principled objection at all. He merely uses whatever argument is convenient to him at a given moment to shut down discussion of this most vital of subjects, and his favourite argument is to accuse his opponents of being ‘offensive’. Actually, this isn’t an argument at all, but a tactic, and a transparent one at that.

Finally, given that he is our Health Minister, why didn’t he already know that 83 Irish women in the last two years have had babies with Down Syndrome aborted in the UK? Is it that he does not care whether he is properly informed about the matter, or that he has advisors who don’t care to give him the facts?