Growing up in Dublin, I had to crowdfund for my friend to get an abortion. This week, I've paid for another girl to go home to vote

Travelling overseas is not an option for everyone. Many buy abortion pills online, risking their lives and incurring a custodial sentence

I was in Dublin during the launch of the abortion referendum, and was completely winded when a man in a T-shirt with a picture of a foetus and the words “Licence to kill” verbally attacked me on O’Connell Street. It unleashed an avalanche of painful memories.

At 16 years old, I had a secret whip-round to pay for a friend to go to London for an abortion. When drinking neat spirits and taking scalding hot baths didn’t terminate her pregnancy, she became suicidal. We scraped together enough to pay for the abortion and Aine’s (not her real name) fare, but it didn’t stretch to accommodation so she slept on the floor at Victoria bus station. She had to make that agonising journey across the Irish Sea, alone.

The image of Aine, so tiny and vulnerable, beneath the giant, forbidding steam ship at Dublin docks on a dank, drizzly day, still haunts me. She had never been away from home before. I remember feeling ashamed of living in a country that subjected women to such punitive indignity.

This week, I helped fund another teenage girl’s voyage across the sea – going in the opposite direction. She’s going home today to vote “yes” in a bid to repeal the barbaric eighth amendment, which enshrines misogyny into the Irish constitution.

In 2018, even in cases of rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormality, abortion remains illegal in Ireland. Over 170,000 Irish women have travelled to Britain for abortions in the 35 years since the inception of the eighth amendment. Around 12 women and girls take that lonely voyage across the sea, every day, to end their pregnancies.

But travelling overseas is not an option for everyone. Teenage girls on the estate I grew up on can’t afford to go abroad. Many buy abortion pills online, risking their lives and incurring a custodial sentence.

The anti-choice propagandists are warning that, with “a licence to kill”, there’ll be pop-up abortion clinics on every high street, from Bantry to Ballyjamesduff, offering two for the price of one and free subscriptions to Abortion Weekly.

As a therapist, I’ve worked with women who have had abortions and the decision is never taken lightly. Girls in Ireland, having been violently impregnated by rape, face the added trauma of being forced to give birth to their abuser’s baby. In case X, when a 14-year-old girl was impregnated by rape and became suicidal, a court injunction was taken out, preventing her parents from taking her abroad for an abortion.

The anti-abortion rhetoric is imbued with the dogma of the Catholic Church, but an institution so mired in paedophilic scandals is in no position to lecture women on the sanctity of life. Only last year, the remains of almost 800 babies were discovered “dumped” in a septic tank on the grounds of a convent in Galway.

In 2012, the needless death of Savita Halappanavar shamed the nation. She died of blood poisoning after being refused an abortion, even though her baby had a fatal foetal abnormality. “This is a Catholic country!” she was told. A change in the law in 2013, purportedly to allow abortions if the mother’s life is at risk or if she’s suicidal, has proved shockingly inadequate.

In 2014, a clinically dead woman was kept alive on a life support machine, against her family’s wishes, to protect the life of her unborn child. Last year, a 14-year-old suicidal child was sectioned by her doctor when she sought permission, with her mother’s approval, for an abortion. Despite acknowledging the child was suicidal, due to her pregnancy, the doctor denied her legal right to a termination. He tricked her into being sectioned, telling her that she would get an abortion, and instead sending her to a psychiatric hospital.

Last year, the UN ruled, for the second time, that Ireland’s harsh abortion laws violate human rights. A woman carrying a foetus with a fatal abnormality was, it stated, subjected to “discrimination and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”. The woman had to travel abroad for an abortion, but was forced to leave her foetus’ remains behind. Weeks later, the ashes were delivered by courier. The UN has called for the eighth amendment to be repealed, to allow women to terminate a pregnancy safely, at home.

The church has exerted undue jurisdiction over women’s wombs – and our lives – for far too long. By repealing the 8th today, we transfer the deeds back to their rightful owners – the women of Ireland.