Martyrs – What price do women have to pay when we ask them to share their stories?

Alex died inside Claire on September 23, 2015. Claire and her family decided to plant a tree in her memory shortly afterwards. Claire knew at the time that she wanted to “do something” about Ireland’s anti-abortion laws, and she discussed it with her and her partner’s parents after they planted the tree.

She ended up joining Termination for Medical Reasons, a group of Irish families who have been affected by a diagnosis of a fatal foetal abnormality. 

Politicians told TFMR that it would be easier for ministers and TDs to come out in favour of abortion reform ahead of the referendum if people heard stories like Claire’s. “It was a huge expectation, a huge burden,” Claire said. 

Telling her story publicly was one thing, but it was another thing altogether to do it as part of a referendum campaign. Claire said she felt under pressure to dig up the worst memories of her pregnancy with Alex, to try to convince people that the law needed to be reformed and that they needed to vote Yes.

“The normal order of things is that you experience something really traumatic, but over time you forget the details - they blur. You heal, and that’s how you heal. You let those details blur. And that’s the kindest thing to do,” she said.

“But we couldn’t, we had to keep reminding ourselves of the worst parts of it. I’d read through text messages and diaries and everything, just to try to refresh the worst of it for myself, so that I could show it to everybody else and say: ‘this is how bad it is.’ And then hope it was bad enough to change things for the next woman. But I should have been moving on.”

The fact that reform would come down to a popular vote meant it was hard to say no to anything. Claire said she kept worrying that the next event would be the difference between winning and losing the referendum. At the time of the referendum campaign, Claire was well into her fourth pregnancy - which was her first since she had lost Alex in 2015. 

Her final campaign event was a public meeting in a hotel in Waterford days before the vote, with a local TD and some prominent members of the Together for Yes campaign. The day of the event, Claire was sitting on the stairs of her family home. She was on the phone to a friend, and she told her about the meeting. Her friend asked Claire how she was, and Claire burst into tears. 

“And I said, I’m so scared. I am so scared, I’m just so afraid to go into this meeting. What am I going to face? Who’s going to be there? What am I going to have to do? I just felt so vulnerable, and so trapped,” Claire said. 

“That night I sat on a stage, pregnant and on crutches and so sore, and told the story and sobbed again. I just felt like a piece of meat at that point. Out of control of everything.”

She hated the one dimensional version of herself that she saw in the media. Her intelligence, her sense of humour, her personality, her love for her other children weren’t afforded any space in stories which Claire dryly described as being about a “full-time bereaved mother.”

There was no room for nuance. Claire was too afraid to talk about some of the rare happy moments she’d had with Alex after she was still-born, because she was afraid it would be used against her by the No campaign. 

“I was afraid that would give ammunition to tear me apart. It did take away from the closeness that I felt, even to Alex at the time. I kept having to describe it as the tragedy, and this torture,” she said. 

“I can think of her now with happiness and with joy, but if you Google me it’s like I’m trapped in that nightmare still.” 

She also felt pressured not to seem like she was coping too well with what had happened with Alex, because she was worried the public wouldn’t think what she’d gone through was bad enough to merit voting Yes. 

“We had to be demonstrably fucked up by what we’d gone through, we couldn’t just be logical and intelligent about the whole thing. Because obviously then it hadn’t affected us badly enough,” Claire said. 

She said women were being re-traumatised by telling their stories, "becoming martyrs for the cause."

TFMR was credited by Simon Harris, the health minister, with helping to win the referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment. There was huge interest in the tragic stories of women who had had to travel because their pregnancy had no chance of surviving. In these stories, the words “wanted pregnancies” were often stressed and repeated. Claire said she noticed that there was less focus on what she called “normal abortions,” where a woman wanted to terminate a pregnancy because she didn’t want to be pregnant. 

Claire said she felt that TFMR’s stories were focused on as the women had wanted to be pregnant, and wanted to be mothers. 

“Freud would have had a field day with the Madonna/Whore thing that went on during that campaign. Jesus Christ,” she said. 

Women who had terminated a pregnancy which had not been clearly diagnosed with a fatal condition were also erased completely, because it wasn't perceived as being electorally popular to talk about terminations for non-fatal abnormalities. Anti-abortion activists were willing to seizing on anything that could be twisted into the suggestion that pregnancies diagnosed with certain disabilities would be terminated in significant rates.

But there was huge media interest in TFMR. Claire estimates that TFMR must have been asked about 25 times over the course of the campaign to let journalists follow a couple on their journey to England, to terminate a pregnancy which had no chance of surviving. One couple had agreed to let a reporter come with them, but TFMR talked them out of it. 

“It may have been the quickest way to get a referendum, or the best way to get a Yes, but nobody should have had to pay that price,” Claire said. 

“I was like, this will kill someone. A woman is going to die because somebody has tried to do this to her. It will end a marriage, it will end a life. It will probably win us the referendum, no problem, but not at that cost.” 

Claire said there was some “salivating” over her story, because she hadn’t been able to travel and had not had an abortion. She was an example of what it was like for a woman to follow the spirit of the Eighth Amendment. 

During the difficult campaign, she depended on a group of women in TFMR who were all going through similar issues. One woman spent thousands of euro of her own money travelling around the country trying to go to as many public meetings as possible. Some women would be asked to do major interviews on TV or in national newspapers, and then left to feel “completely dropped” afterwards.

“There was no aftercare,” Claire said. “That was a big thing. I think there needs to be something.”

Because these stories were told as part of a referendum campaign and not in isolation, the individual women came under major scrutiny from those who were against abortion reform. Claire developed a “pathological” habit of responding to all of the online abuse she was getting. She thought if people really understood what had happened to her, then they couldn’t possibly vote No. She wanted people to confirm that what she’d gone through was wrong. Claire said she read every nasty comment that people sent her, and would often reply before blocking the abusive account.

“I was so desperate,” she said. “I needed everybody to say ‘you don’t deserve this.’”

For Claire, the process of having to repeat this sad story in a short, accessible way over and over again made her feel like a “performing monkey.” In the end, the process of speaking out publicly was almost as hard on her and her family as losing Alex was. 

“Our marriage barely survived it. I don’t think that would be a shock to anyone that we got over the bereavement much easier than we did the campaigning,” Claire said. 

She’s proud of what she did, but it was incredibly difficult for her. 

“I do sometimes wish I had just let someone else do it.”