Vigil for Baby C

Please come and take part in a Candlelight Commemoration for ‘Baby C’, on Sunday 22 November, at the GPO (General Post Office) in Dublin’s O’Connell Street. The commemoration will start at 3.30 pm.

Readers will remember how, in November 1997, the Eastern Health Board (now the Health Service Executive) sought an Order from the Courts to bring a young girl who had been raped to the UK, in order to have her 14-week-old unborn baby killed. It was decided to appeal the decision in the High Court. On 28 November 1997, the High Court Judge refused to allow the appeal, and the mother and her unborn baby were to be brought to the UK by the Eastern Health Board for an abortion. The parents of the young girl were not allowed to see or speak to their daughter without EHB supervision. Despite the apparent success of an application of Habeas Corpus on behalf of the unborn child, made to the High Court on 3 December 1997 (the EHB having been informed, on 2 December, that the Habeas Corpus application would be made on the following morning), the Eastern Health Board announced at lunchtime on 3 December that they had already brought the young mother to the UK. In the early days of December 1997 the unborn baby was killed, and her young mother was deeply traumatised. Years later, she said that at the time when she was brought to the UK by the Eastern Health Board staff she didn’t know what an abortion was, and that she still mourns the death of her baby.

My blog of 16 June 2009 gives an account of the young mother’s distress today – twelve years after the Eastern Health Board was responsible for the killing of her unborn baby.