On a dark February morning before anyone was awake, Alison Gibney and her partner Ian packed up their car to make the first boat to England.
"We were really excited," Alison said about discovering in September 2021 that they were expecting their first baby."We have loads of friends who had small kids and we watched them grow up and all the fun that comes with it." In a May 2018 referendum, Ireland voted by a majority to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution Act, thereby ensuring the introduction of abortion legislation early the following year.
A few days after Alison’s termination, when she was discharged from hospital in Liverpool, she and Ian got to take Rose home to Ireland."They gave us a letter if we were stopped to say she was stillborn, but they advised us to hide her to be on the safe side," an emotional Alison explained. It is those kinds of traumatic circumstances which form a mainstay of a landmark review of Ireland's abortion legislation authored by Barrister Marie O’Shea. The Termination of Pregnancy Act 2018 provided for such a review three years after its implementation. Commissioned by the Department of Health, the report makes several recommendations.