Abortion Discussion, Part the Fourth

The woman at the centre of the ‘Miss D’ case in 2007 has said she is “enraged” and “hurt deeply” that women with fatal foetal abnormality diagnoses still have to leave Ireland for abortions.

Amy Dunne was 16 and in State care when she became pregnant. She found out her baby had anencephaly — a fatal condition where parts of the baby’s skull are missing — on her 17th birthday.

Speaking at an event on Wednesday to mark the fourth anniversary of the repeal of the 8th amendment, she said that within moments of telling her social worker she wanted to terminate her pregnancy, she was threatened with a murder charge and told that both the Garda and the passport office would be informed she was not permitted to travel for an abortion.

“I was to carry this pregnancy to the end without any empathy or consideration for my mental health,” said Ms Dunne. In May 2007, the High Court ruled she was legally entitled to travel for an abortion.

Wednesday’s event, hosted by the National Women’s Council (NWC), heard despite that 2018 legislation permitting abortion on request up to 12 weeks, many women still faced barriers. These include a mandatory three-day waiting period between requesting an abortion and receiving abortifacient medication; geographical inconsistencies in availability of GPs providing abortion services; and, for women with a diagnosis of a foetal abnormality, two doctors must agree her baby would die within 28 days of birth for it to be deemed fatal. Where there was a doubt over how long the baby would live after birth, the woman must still travel after 12 weeks.

Ms Dunne said the traumas she experienced were “lifelong”.

“The most difficult part was to leave my baby in Liverpool. No time to see my daughter’s face, no time to sober up after the medication that was needed in my 16-hour labour — just crawling on to a plane, heavily bleeding and trying to hide the shame and hurt while picturing my daughter in a room in a different country.

“All these years later, I still have traumas and these are lifelong. I have contacted undertakers and hospitals, even after 15 years, trying to find out what my baby looked like. I’ve contemplated digging her up many times just to try to get the time that wasn’t given to me.

“It hurts deeply to know, like my story, many are still living through this ordeal. I am speaking out today because I want to help ensure that no woman has to travel abroad for basic healthcare that she should be able to receive at home . . . What’s still happening today is not what people voted for four years ago.”

Dr Marion Dyer, a GP based in Blanchardstown, Dublin, said when she listened to Ms Dunne all she could think was, “Ireland, you are so cruel to women”.

“What I hear being described by Amy meets the definition of torture,” she said.

The NWC published data showing just one in 10 GPs offer abortion services, and just 11 of the 19 maternity units or hospitals in Ireland provide abortion services.

The 2018 Act is currently being reviewed. Among changes needed, says the NWC, are extending the current 12-week limit to abortion on request, removal of the three-day wait time, decriminalisation, and broadening the definition of fatal foetal abnormality.

On 4 November 2019, TV stations across California blasted Chelsea Becker’s photo on their news editions. The “search was on” for a “troubled” 25-year-old woman wanted for the “murder of her unborn baby”, news anchors said, warning viewers not to approach if they spotted her but to call the authorities.

The next day, Becker was asleep at the home she was staying in when officers with the Hanford police department arrived.

“The officer had a large automatic weapon pointed at me and a K-9 [dog],” Becker, now 28, recalled in a recent interview. “I walked out and surrendered.”

Two months before, Becker had had a stillbirth at a California hospital, losing a baby boy at eight months pregnant. The King’s county prosecutor in the central valley charged her with “murder of a human fetus”, alleging she had acted with “malice” because she had been struggling with drug addiction and the hospital reported meth in her system.

Becker’s attorneys argued there was no evidence that substance use caused the stillbirth and California law did not allow for this type of prosecution in the first place. Still, she spent 16 months in jail awaiting trial before a judge dismissed the charges.

Becker’s nightmare offers a preview of the kinds of criminal cases that could become commonplace in the US if the supreme court, as expected after the leak of a draft opinion last month, officially overturns Roe v Wade. In the states that outlaw abortion, advocates warn, pregnancy losses more broadly will be treated as potential crimes, including in cases of wanted pregnancies. Even with Roe in effect, women have repeatedly faced arrest and charges for their pregnancy outcomes.

More than 200 women travelled from the Republic of Ireland to access abortion services in Britain last year, according to new figures from UK health services.

Some 206 women gave addresses in the Republic when seeking abortions in England and Wales in 2021, a very small increase compared to 194 women who travelled from the Republic for abortions in 2020 when Covid-19 travel restrictions were in place.

The new figures from Britain show in about half of the cases women were travelling from the Republic for abortions where there was a foetal abnormality, which previously had accounted for a third of cases in 2020. There was an 18 per cent drop in the number of abortions carried out up to 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Commenting on the figures, Niall Behan, chief executive of the Irish Family Planning Association, said the number of Irish women travelling to Britain for abortions showed the law permitting abortions in the Republic was “not good enough”.

Mr Behan said legislation introduced in 2018 was “denying care to women and girls and forcing them to seek abortion services in the UK”, which he said was an “unacceptable injustice”.

One of the main issues was a mandatory three-day waiting period for women seeking to access abortion care, he said. “We know from our services that the law is also forcing some who present at under 12 weeks of pregnancy to travel outside of Ireland for abortion services,” he said.

Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly late last year announced a review of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018, which sets out the provision of abortion services.

Mr Behan said the law had “serious flaws” and “restrictive” provisions, which was forcing pregnant women to access abortions outside of the State.

Doctors at the Rosie Hospital in Cambridge said her life was in danger if she carried on with the pregnancy.

In her tweet, she said: "Abortion saves lives. But I've come to the conclusion that actually, people know this.

"You know the astonishing complexity of pregnancy, you know people get coerced, you know people are simply too poor to cope, you know all the myriad reasons someone might need safe access to abortion. The sickening thing is, you just don't care."

She said the message coming from the US was "both expected and deeply, deeply wrong".

Ireland’s abortion legislation is “inhumane” and “discriminatory” in its treatment of women with crisis pregnancies, the United Nations human rights committee has heard.

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Hélène Tigroudja, a member of the body, said the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Act) 2018 placed “very many barriers, both legal and practical” to “safe, legal and non-discriminatory access to abortion”.

Referring to the mandatory three-day wait period for women between asking for a medical abortion and accessing the medication, Ms Tigroudja said this was “a disadvantage for women living in rural areas, women in poverty and women experiencing violence [who] simply cannot return several times”.

The rule that women with a diagnosis of a fatal foetal anomaly could access abortion only where there was certainty that the foetus would die within 28 days of birth meant that many women who could not travel had to carry such pregnancies to term.

“This is a problem for women who are less well off. They have to continue with their pregnancy ... This is inhuman treatment and this is discrimination on the grounds of economic status,” she said.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has told the Dáil that a review of abortion legislation in the State will be completed by the end of this year.

Four years on from the landmark referendum repealing the Eighth Amendment, Mr Martin said: "These are complex issues at the best of times, however, the law of the land should apply, and should be adhered to, particularly through the HSE."

He was commenting following the publication of a report today which found the needs of women seeking abortion services for severe fatal foetal anomalies were not being met.

Mr Martin described some of the findings in the report as "disturbing" and said the analysis by Dr Catherine Conlon, Assistant Professor of Social Studies at Trinity College Dublin, would feed into this review of the legislation.