When Sarah Ewart went for a 19-week scan, she was told that the baby she was carrying had a fatal defect. The brain and skull had not developed properly. It would inevitably die either before it was born or moments afterwards.
Profoundly upsetting though this was, it was the treatment that followed which really disturbed Ewart and her husband, Jason.
Ewart returned to the hospital in Belfast to ask about having an abortion. Doctors informed her that this was not an option in Northern Ireland, and when she inquired where she might go to seek a termination elsewhere, they said they were unable to give her any information about where to get help.
“They were frustrated, but they said their hands were tied,” she said, recalling events that unfolded in the autumn of 2013. “They said: ‘We can’t tell you anything, we would be prosecuted if we gave you that information.’ They weren’t allowed to talk about the options; no phone numbers; no clinic address.”
Some days later, having consulted as many people as she could, and certain that her case was one of the rare and exceptional cases when an abortion could be performed in Northern Ireland, she met a second consultant.
This woman “banged her files on the desk and said: ‘I’m not going to prison for anyone,’” Ewart recalled, in an interview at the east Belfast home of her mother, Jane Christie. Punitive draft guidelines, stating that healthcare workers risked life imprisonment for performing an unlawful abortion, had been published by the health minister earlier that year. The issue was making doctors very nervous.
Instead, Ewart, 25, resorted to searching the Yellow Pages for guidance. After consulting the Northern Ireland Family Planning Association, she made an appointment to have the procedure done in London, at a cost – with flights and hotels included – of more than £2,100. Ewart had recently got married, and the family had to go to their local bank to ask for a loan to cover the cost.
The sense of injustice she felt at her treatment compelled her to add her voice to the campaign to get the law on abortion changed, a campaign that had some preliminary success in November when the high court ruled that the near-blanket ban on abortion breached European human rights legislation. With her mother’s support, she contacted all 108 members of Northern Ireland’s legislative assembly, and all Westminster MPs from the region, demanding their help in changing the law.
When only two responded to her initial email, she went to the media, and BBC Radio Ulster’s very popular Nolan Show highlighted her difficult journey to England, bringing the issue to the top of the political agenda.
Becoming the poster girl for a campaign to liberalise Northern Ireland’s rigid abortion legislation has not been much fun. A soft-spoken administrative assistant in a healthcare clinic, Ewart had no burning desire to take on this explosive issue in a political environment still very hostile to reform.
For her efforts, she has received considerable online abuse. Following the high court ruling, she was sent numerous images of bloodied corpses of aborted foetuses. Her mother has been told that she is a “cruel, callous woman” who conspired to “murder her grandchild”. Ewart has been told repeatedly online that she is a murderer who will rot in hell, and describing the detail of the abuse makes her cry.
Sometimes the abuse comes in person. Leaving the family planning clinic in Belfast in October 2013, just days after she was given the news about the baby’s condition and when she was seeking advice about travelling to England for an abortion, Ewart was pursued down the road by protesters, screaming abuse at her. Refusing to let her go, one woman stuck her head in the door of Ewart’s grandfather’s car as he tried to drive her home, shouting: “You are destroying the baby.”
One of the worst moments came when she and her mother went to visit the then health minister, Jim Wells, a member of the Democratic Unionist party, to explain why she wanted a change in the law to allow women carrying babies with a fatal foetal abnormality to seek a termination.
“He said that I had destroyed a baby that would have survived, that the consultants get these diagnoses wrong,” she said. “He was blunt and direct. I was sitting in tears the whole time that I was there. I couldn’t speak. We got up and left.”
She was dismayed that the health minister had no grasp of the medical condition, anencephaly. “It was horrible. I was so upset to think that people in power could speak like that. It was extremely hurtful. He didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t kill a baby that would have survived – the baby was never going to survive. That’s what makes me angry. I didn’t utter a word, I couldn’t because I was so upset,” she said.
The DUP initially indicated that it supported her campaign, but subsequently reverted to a firm position of refusing any amendment to the law. Elsewhere, she has had more success. She met Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, who was sympathetic, and following their meeting the party changed its position to support an amendment on the law on abortion, allowing it in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities.
Her campaign is limited to a very modest change to the law to allow women in her situation to get medical treatment in Northern Ireland, rather than having to undergo the trauma and inconvenience of travelling abroad and having to pay for private treatment.
She is not in favour of a broader liberalisation of the law to bring it in line with the rest of the United Kingdom. The vast majority of women currently travelling to England for terminations would still have to do so even if the changes she proposes were implemented.
“I don’t agree with getting rid of a baby that would have survived,” she said. But her experience has made her thoughtful about expressing an opinion on anyone else’s decision. “Now I say, don’t judge me until you have walked in my shoes. I wouldn’t want to judge anyone else until I’d walked in theirs.”
Ewart has been working with Amnesty, which is lobbying for a broader reform of Northern Ireland’s legislation. There was some disappointment in December that the high court judge referred legislation change to the Northern Ireland assembly rather than giving guidance himself. With the DUP opposed to change, there is recognition that political change may take some time.
But Ewart is inclined to feel optimistic. “I do have a sense that things are changing. Before people wouldn’t have even talked about it. Me speaking out has made the public understand that there are more reasons why you might need an abortion,” she said. A poll conducted by Amnesty last year showed that two-thirds of people in Northern Ireland support reforming the law, in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, rape and incest.
Last October Ewart gave birth to a healthy son, Jacob. She would like to have more children, but hopes the law will change first. There is a raised risk of a recurrence of anencephaly, and she does not want to be put through the trauma of having to travel again. Aside from the expense, which pushed her family into debt, she found the practicalities of having to travel to an unfamiliar city, to an unknown clinic, for a serious medical procedure, very distressing.
“I could never do that again. It was a horrendous experience,” she said.
