‘Early one morning, I received a phone call from the A & E nurse. A fifteen-year-old girl had come in with severe abdominal pain and pain while urinating. The GP had diagnosed a bladder infection, but when her symptoms didn’t subside, her stepfather had brought her to the hospital. The nurse – in her wisdom and experience – smelled a rat. This is no bladder infection, she said.
I took an ultrasound of her belly and saw immediately what the problem was. The girl had an abnormally enlarged uterus, which meant that she must have given birth very recently. I asked her point blank where the baby was, but she seemed incredulous. I remember being quite terse in my response. I turned to the stepfather. “Go home and look for a baby,” I said.
At that moment, the girl’s mother came in carrying a plastic bag. She had found a dead baby outside the house beneath the window sill, with the umbilical cord still attached. Her daughter had given birth to a child alone that night and had presumably panicked. The girl was unresponsive, so I couldn’t find out whether she’d even known she was pregnant beforehand. The autopsy showed that the baby had been born alive but hadn’t survived the freezing overnight conditions. Everyone in the ward was in shock. Since I couldn’t state natural causes on the baby’s death certificate, the public prosecutor was informed and an investigation followed.
We kept the girl in for observation over the next few days, and the nurses tried to get her talking. I wanted to know just how traumatic the previous night had been for her. We never found out. I saw her several times more during consultations, when I also observed her mother’s recriminations. They came from a big South American family with lots of children, one extra would have been no problem, she said. Why had she let the baby die?
The nurses told me later that they frequently saw the girl wandering through the hospital afterwards, roaming the corridors near the nurseries during visiting hours. We didn’t really know what to do … she must have been in quite a state.
If nothing else, the drama surrounding this girl has given me a completely new perspective on abortion. It all transpired during the late eighties; the Abortion Act had just been passed, but I still fiercely opposed the termination of any pregnancy. I was brought up in a southern Catholic family with eleven children, and we’d all been instilled with a great sense of respect for unborn life. But this girl’s story confronted me with a reality that my studies had never shown me, a world where the problems are so great that abortion was often the best solution. Later, after working for some time in Africa and the Caribbean, I saw many young girls whose pregnancies brought them nothing but trouble. I could close my eyes to it no longer, and since then I have done a lot of work to promote contraception among young people.
It wasn’t until much later that I started wondering whether I’d truly done enough for this girl. Had I fallen short, perhaps not medically, but emotionally? My children were the same age – perhaps I responded too much like an angry father? I called the principal of her school and asked him to keep an eye on her for me. Should I have asked after her, to find out how she was doing? The family had quickly shut everybody out and blocked almost all contact with the outside world. But despite all the barriers, now, when I look back, I do feel a sense of regret.’