Claire Cullen-Delsol and her husband Wayne with their stillborn daughter Alex

Further to calls for a repeal of the Eight Amendment.

Ellen Coyne, in the Ireland edition of The Times, reports:

Claire Cullen-Delsol, 31, a mother of two from Waterford city, had to wait over a month for her daughter’s heartbeat to stop naturally before she could end a pregnancy that had no medical chance of succeeding.

Ms Cullen-Delsol and her husband, Wayne, have an eight-year-old daughter and a 20-month-old son. In August, twenty weeks into her pregnancy, she was told that Alex, her second daughter, would not survive because of a chromosome disorder.

…Ms Cullen-Delsol said that travelling for an abortion seemed too traumatic, so her only choice was to wait until the baby died.

“During those five weeks I could still feel her moving inside me, and every week the movement would get less and less — she was dying inside me,” she said. “Sometimes when I couldn’t feel her moving I would drink something cold and then something hot, and then I might try loud music, and then I might jump around to see if she’d move, just to be sure.

“I would wake up every day and say, ‘Is it going to be today? Is today going to be the day she dies?’”

“…There were times when I’d have to leave the house to go shopping, because the kids needed to eat, and I might see a mother with a baby and just have to abandon the trolley and go home. It was absolute torture. There were days when I would have to call people for help. My daughter started begging her dad not to go to work, because she could hear me crying after he left.

She added: “One night I woke up, and there was a complete stillness unlike anything I could describe. There was no movement. I knew she was gone.”

‘I had to wait for my baby to die inside me’ (Ellen Coyne, Ireland edition of The Times, no paywall)

Pic: Claire Cullen Delsol

Thanks Richard