In Ireland, abortion is currently illegal, but it sadly may not remain that way for long; in May, voters will go to the polls to decide if the 8th Amendment will be repealed, which recognizes that both mother and child have an equal right to life. Currently, women seeking abortion have to travel to the United Kingdom, where abortion is legal through 24 weeks of pregnancy, and then restricted afterwards except in cases of fetal abnormality — even as minor as a cleft lip.
The abortion lobby is campaigning heavily to repeal the 8th Amendment and to legalize abortion in Ireland, but others are also coming forward to express their support the the 8th. One of them is an Irish nurse who had a truly horrifying story to tell.
Caren was working as an agency nurse in Sydney, Australia, when a woman came into her hospital to have an abortion. Her baby had a chromosomal abnormality, and while Caren wasn’t tasked with caring for that woman, she was on her ward. “I went into the sluice room and I saw the baby, a 22-week-old baby boy, in a kidney dish in at the sink where all the clinical waste was flushed,” she said. “He was small but he was perfect. You could see his toes, his hands; he seemed like he had blond hair. He was the full size of the kidney dish and he was alive. I could see the rise and fall of his chest; he was breathing.”
As a young nurse, Caren didn’t know what to do. “Because this was an abortion, I wasn’t allowed to intervene. I couldn’t get help for the baby, I couldn’t hold him or comfort him, or get oxygen for him or ask anyone to help him live,” she recalled. “To see that baby trying to breathe, and nobody helping him, was so distressing and it will haunt me for the rest of my life. I had to leave the sluice room, and I had to leave the baby there and that was the hardest part of all because I felt I had abandoned the baby. He was a child, he was a human being.”
The memory haunted her, but it also haunted the mother of the baby. “That same evening I heard the baby’s mother weeping in her room. She was inconsolable,” she said. “I wondered what she had been told, and if she was advised to abort her baby because he was considered imperfect.”
In the video below, Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortionist, describes the awful process of a late-term induction abortion:
Now, Caren wants to make sure the 8th Amendment is not repealed. “There is no dignity in abortion. There is no respect in it. There’s no justice in it,” she said. “I fear for nurses like me if this abortion proposal is passed, and for the culture it will create in Irish hospitals. I fear that doctors will be expected to sit in judgment on the value of a baby’s life because of a suspected abnormality.”
She continued, “There is a heartbreaking reality to repealing the 8th amendment and legalizing abortion that is largely being ignored. I never want any nurse to see the heartbreaking reality that I saw.”
The sad reality is that babies are frequently left to die after abortions, and the same will undoubtedly happen in Ireland if the 8th Amendment is repealed. As it is, Ireland is already being affected by the horror of abortion, and legalizing it will only make it worse. Ireland must save the 8th.
