My planned pregnancy changed my views on abortion for ever

I wrote a letter in 2010 titled “what we need is better adoption law, not abortion” I pontificated on abortion and protecting the rights of the unborn.

Now five years later, as a mother, I could cry reading it back. My teenage self assumed that pregnancy was easy.

When I found out I was pregnant with my son it was due to the extreme level of vomiting.

I had my first trip to the Emergency Department at six weeks pregnant and was given medications normally reserved for treating nausea in chemotherapy patients.

Some days I only vomited a handful of times. Most of the time however, even the smell of my own skin, the motion of walking just a few steps, the taste of my own saliva, could trigger vomiting.

Nurses struggled to place new IVs in my collapsed veins. I couldn’t wash my own hair or bathe, couldn’t stand for weakness, as I was vomiting 60 times a day and was in and out of hospital.

It was a living hell.

I wish I could say I was treated with kindness but the 8th amendment loomed heavily over every aspect of the care in my wanted pregnancy.

On my umpteenth admission, a nurse came to me in my bed and told me that “if you just accepted your situation you’d feel much better” I was made to feel like an incubator. Hyperemesis can only be cured by delivery of the placenta so I asked for an induction shortly before my due date.

I was told that despite my mental and physical health, my son was going to full term. He was what mattered here, not me.

My days were spent clinging to the sides of a hospital bed with my eyes shut tight, jaw clenched, praying for the room to stop spinning, feeling like I was dying.

When the time came I asked for a c-section, feeling that I didn’t have the physical strength to give birth.

It was denied and instead I was forced to endure a 40 hour induction ending in an emergency section under general anaesthetic.

There was no consideration of consent, of me as a human being. I was nothing but a vessel. That is the reality of the 8th amendment.

My son is the absolute light of my life but I chose to have him. Could I ever apply a moral checklist to abortion access knowing how torturous pregnancy can be for some women?

Absolutely not, not a single human being should be forced ever to continue a pregnancy.

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