Amanda Mellet: I still suffer from grief and trauma

The woman who took her case against Ireland’s abortion laws to the UN says her wish is that it spares other women the pain she has endured.

Amanda Mellet from Dublin did not appear in public to respond to the landmark ruling from the UN’s Human Rights Committee. Her submission to the committee says that “she still suffers from complicated grief and unresolved trauma”.

In a statement, however, she said: “With today’s decision in hand, I wish to finally leave behind these painful memories, and hearing the committee’s findings today does help in my own healing.

“But my most sincere hope is that it may assist Ireland’s government in finding the courage to make the necessary changes in law.

“I hope the day will soon come when women in Ireland will be able to access the health services they need in our own country, where we can be with our loved ones, with our own medical team, and where we have our own familiar bed to go home and cry in. Subjecting women to so much additional pain and trauma must not continue.”

Those were sentiments understood only too well by Gaye and Gerry Edwards, who hoped the ruling would bring a level of comfort and solidarity for distraught parents that was absent when they lost their first child to a fatal foetal abnormality 15 years ago.

“It will help to remove the stigma,” said Gaye, who remembers all too clearly the pain of making arrangements to travel to Belfast to terminate their much-wanted pregnancy.

“It may help to remove some of the isolation. We believed we were the only people that this had ever happened to.”

The couple, from Kilcoole, Co Wicklow, were among the earliest members of TFMR Ireland (Terminations for Medical Reasons), and welcomed the UN’s ruling, although Gerry said it may increase the frustration of couples with newly diagnosed fatal foetal impairments in the short term.

“There will be the difficulty of being denied treatment which the UN has said they should be entitled to but at least they will know that the abuse they are feeling is real and not a figment of their imagination, that they’re not doing anything wrong,” said Gerry.

“It’s a very damaging experience, having a pregnancy that you’ve been celebrating, that everybody knows about and that suddenly is over. There’s no baby, there’s no funeral, it’s just disappeared and the suggestion is that it’s disappeared under a cloud with the implication that maybe you didn’t want the baby.”

Gerry called on the Government to lift the cloud without delay. “If there was genuine political will, they could have a bill through the Dáil in six months.”

In the meantime, he called for the immediate repeal of the Regulation of Information Act 1995 which has left medics walking a tightrope between providing information about abortion without being viewed in any way as promoting it.

“It’s a cynical and punitive piece of legislation. Getting rid of it is a small step that can be taken immediately.”