Emma Connors (36) still struggles to understand how she was told that her unborn baby had fatal foetal anomalies only to be told days later its anomalies were merely “complex”.
The changed emphasis meant the Dublin woman did not qualify for termination of her much-wanted pregnancy. Instead, she had to travel to England.
Describing the experience in early 2019 as “devastating”, she says Ireland “washed its hands” of her and her family because her baby’s anomalies were “not fatal enough”.
Her case emerged within days of the commencement of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 and was raised in the Dáil by Ruth Coppinger, then a Solidarity TD. Describing it as a “test case” of the new legislation and without naming Connors, she said that despite having been “certified” as having a fatal foetal abnormality “by two consultants”, she was being “refused her constitutional right that we all voted for to have an abortion”.
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Under the Act, abortion is only allowed after the first 12 weeks of pregnancy in cases where the pregnant woman’s life or health is at risk, or in cases of fatal foetal abnormality.
Connors recalls vividly being told by two obstetricians at a scan at the Coombe hospital, Dublin, on January 10th, 2019: “This baby will not survive.”
“The organs were on the outside. The heart was in the wrong place. There were so many problems ... They sat me and my partner, Chris, down and said, ‘This is a fatal foetal abnormality. If you want an abortion, that is something we can sign off on.’ We immediately said, ‘Yes, we don’t want this baby to suffer any more if the baby is not well’.
A multidisciplinary team met on January 16th, 2019. By letter the following day, they told her: “Despite the complex foetal anomaly, we are not of the reasonable opinion formed in good faith that there is present a condition affecting the foetus that is likely to lead to the death of the foetus either before or within 28 days of birth.”
She says: “A week earlier I had been lying in the bed and they looked me dead in the eye, saying, ‘This baby will not survive’.
“I don’t understand how you can go from that to saying, ‘It’s just a serious foetal abnormality. We’re not going to provide an abortion ... You are just going to have to carry on and wait to see if the baby survives’. How they can expect someone to do that? It’s inhumane, cruel.”
About 16 weeks into the pregnancy, helped by the London-based Abortion Support Network, she travelled with her partner to a clinic in Liverpool. “The doctor came in the next day. She said there was no way the baby would have survived and the abortion should have been provided at home.”
Both sides of the family were “quite angry ... asking, ‘What did we vote for?’ They felt ignored”.
Once home she “threw [herself] into work. I tried to move forward, cried a lot. My partner, it took a serious toll on him. We lost a second baby to miscarriage but we got pregnant again and we have a lovely, healthy baby boy now.”
“My country washed its hands of us. For women like me nothing has changed since Repeal. You have doctors trying to cover themselves because the law is not allowing them be honest with women or to give them the care. Once you pass 12 weeks, you are on your own.
“The most disappointing thing is that it was cases like ours that got abortion passed. The empathy the nation felt for people like us is what made them come out and vote Yes.”
The Coombe hospital declined to comment on Connors’ case.
