READ THE TRANSCRIPT OF THIS HOUSEMATE’S TESTIMONY
READ THE TRANSCRIPT OF THIS HOUSEMATE’S TESTIMONY
On BBC Radio Ulster’s The Stephen Nolan Show on Wednesday 6th April 2016, one of the housemates who contacted the police and reported the young woman who ordered abortion pills online and aborted her ten to twelve week old unborn baby boy in Belfast and dumped him in a bin, explained why she contacted the police:
“Well she had come in from work one day and she made herself a cup of tea and she just seemed a bit off and I asked her what was wrong. She told us she was pregnant and we were just in shock. She told us she didn’t want it and [inaudible]. She was with a guy but I think they had broke up. She was dead set on having an abortion. She said she couldn’t get the money together but she did work in the same place as me and the rent was only 200 so she could have, when she got paid, went over and done it. If she had turned round to us and said ‘I can’t pay the rent this month, I’m doing this’, we would have been like ‘that’s okay’, but she didn’t want us telling anybody. Her mother, she wouldn’t tell her mum even though her mum would have supported her fully. She was given an option of, the other girl I lived with had just been through a miscarriage. She said that she would take the baby and she was just having none of it. She wasn’t overly panicked about this, we did try to help her and talk to her about it. She wanted our view on it and obviously I wouldn’t have an abortion personally so I didn’t have any supportive thing to say to her. I didn’t really talk about it much to her and the other girl did. It just kinda went on like that, back and forward for a while. Then she had told me she had found out about these tablets on the internet, and I was like, ‘how did you find out?’, and a girl over in England had told her about them. And I was like, ‘there is no way you can do that’, you know, but at this point I was kind of staying out of it a bit more and I was working flat out anyway and it was over my head really, to be fair. It would have been more the other girl who would have spoke. She was probably older in the house, she was probably a bit more wiser.
“So it kept going on, her bump was showing. She was going to a wedding. We did her makeup and her hair. We didn’t have any malice against her in the house. We didn’t make any difference between her. It was fine and then it was the twelfth weekend. I was down home with my granny and the other girl was up in the house and I got a phone call and I said, ‘What’s going on?’ and she said ‘She’s done it’ and I was like ‘What?’ She had went upstairs and taken the tablets and she had texted the girl for a pair of scissors and she was like, ‘What? Why?’ She went up and she spoke to her and the girl tried to tell her it will just have to pass naturally. She was saying that the baby was just hanging out of her. It was just mad. She went downstairs and the other girl got a plastic bag from under the sofa so that she could lie down, get herself cleaned and changed and that. We didn’t really know what she had done with the baby, to be fair, ‘cause she just kinda sat quiet and watched TV. That was the end of it. And then whenever I got back up home, and we were like, ‘You must have put the rubbish out in the bin’ and that must be it, and we seen the wee baby, and I was like ‘Oh my word’. You would never want to see it in your life, you just wouldn’t. It was a full wee proper baby. Papers are saying it was ten to twelve weeks. It has to have been older than that. Its sex was a male.”
And how did she deal with all of this? How did the woman deal with all of this?
“She didn’t seem to do anything. You know, like, I have said she showed no remorse because she really didn’t. She was completely fine about it. She referred to the baby as a pest quite a lot. When I actually asked her why she through it in the bin, her words to me were, ‘what do you want me to do, put it in a bag and fling it up the street? It’s dealt with.’ It was quite a heartless response.”
The difficulty is, of course, we don’t know how people deal with certain circumstances. You could be in denial, loads of other emotions running through your body, thinking how you deal with it. I’m sure it’s really hard to understand what was going through her mind. She may have been saying things but not feeling what she was saying.
“You know, that is right. She could be feeling different. I’m just saying what she was portraying, you know, to us as how she was feeling. There was no remorse. We were more broke up about it, you know, on the outside. I obviously don’t know what was going on in the inside at all, I can’t comment on that. Just from things she was saying to us, it came across like that.”
And then of course you had that difficult decision to make as to what you should do about this. How did you decide that it was the right course of action to contact the police?
“Well it wasn’t even the fact that I really wanted to contact the police. I was asked on the radio yesterday why didn’t we call an ambulance. We were begged and pleaded with by her not to tell anybody, like literally nobody, she wanted no doctor. The other girl had advised her that she would need to go to a hospital, she couldn’t just leave that. She was like no. Obviously it wasn’t our decision to kind of make. We kinda thought well we can’t do anything it’s not our place to say anything. It was about a week went by. We just, we couldn’t, the guilt of a baby in the bin was eating us up. We actually rang the police for advice. I don’t even know how it came about and then when the police came it turned into something massive. We actually didn’t think it would have went as far. We were kinda shocked, ‘cause we had never heard of it before. Nobody had really heard of it before. But we had to ring the police. We did feel bad but she still didn’t feel bad. She said she would claim mental health you know to get it to go away. I have been told she didn’t do that, she did plead guilty and all, you know. Maybe having a baby has matured her. Since then she’s had a baby, you know, only a year later.”
What happened the foetus?
“The police took the, I call it a baby, the police took the baby and they had a postmortem and I think that it was probably cremated. I can’t call it a foetus because I seen it. I seen it and it had its proper toes and fingers and its nose. It was a baby. I don’t care what anybody says.”
And how did you deal with that, because I would imagine seeing a foetus or a baby, a lot of people, some people call it a baby some people like to say foetus, and how did you deal with that emotionally and come to terms with that?
“Well, I don’t know, like, you don’t really know what to do, you just have to get on with it. I think I was more, the other girl in the house, she was my friend, I had to find the other girl who had done it on sparerooms.com, so we had only known each other, I suppose we were living together for four or five months, so we had got to know each other quite well. But the other girl I had known for years and she had just went through a miscarriage and then was told she couldn’t have children, so I was more preoccupied with my friend because she kind of broke down.”
Your friend actually offered to be legal guardian for the baby.
“Yeah because they were kind of pregnant around the same time. They were both pregnant around the same time. My friend had had a miscarriage and was devastated, that’s all she ever wanted was children. She did offer, she says to her I will take the baby as my own, no one will ever know, you know, I’m a bigger girl, no one will notice. She just thought she could carry it on, and she was like no, why would I go through labour to give life to something I don’t want. It was kind of that attitude. I kind of took a back seat because I was just getting angry at the situation. Everybody on Facebook thinks this is a whole abortion war, it’s completely not. We have no views on abortion. Well, I wouldn’t have one personally, and that’s why I couldn’t say much to her because I knew what my view was, but each to their own. It’s everybody’s choice what they want to do. But that’s what everybody is making this out to be, it’s not. The only thing we were concerned about was that there was a baby in the bin and we didn’t know what to do.
“We were scared. I was twenty years of age; I didn’t have a clue what to do, so, and that is why ended up ringing the police. I don’t know, everyone is cracking up at us. We have been called arseholes and everything on Facebook and everything you know, and unless you have been in that situation, if you can live with a foetus or a baby or whatever you want to call it, you know, it was a baby boy, in the bin, then and do nothing about it, then you’re, I just don’t know how you could do it.”
How did you feel then whenever you learned that she was going to be prosecuted and brought before the court?
“Well, whenever we, our house was cordoned off for investigation and we were put up in a hotel and he did tell us at that stage, he was like ‘Would you be okay in court if it goes to that?’ and we literally were like ’What?’, you know, ‘Is it going to go to that?’ But then two years went by and we heard nothing. We thought it was completely dealt with. But in that time, obviously with not hearing anything, we did get kind of get a bit annoyed, you know. It’s not that we really wanted her punished, we wanted to know that you just can’t throw a baby in the bin, you know, so, when she got this sentence, you it’s twelve months suspended sentence, and it’s three months, but if she does nothing bad in the year, then there’s nothing that has been done. [correction: it was a three month jail sentence, suspended for two years]
“A lot of abortion [inaudible] are saying it should have been a higher sentence, you know, I didn’t know what I was expecting, to be fair, I didn’t know if the court would just throw it out or if there was going to be a huge sentence. I genuinely didn’t know what, I was actually thinking of an outcome at all. Obviously I did want justice for the wee baby. It wasn’t the wee baby’s fault, and I just, I don’t know. It was the craziest experience ever. It’s something you would never think would happen.”
Lots of debate of course after this case whether the case should have been taken in the first place, whether or not the woman should have been punished in court and whether or not she should have received perhaps a stiffer sentence as some people had suggested yesterday. What do you think of that?
“Well, I know that we have a law that everyone says is a hundred and fifty years’ old and all that and the rest of the UK [inaudible]. I have tried to stay away from this topic because I do, it’s everybody, everyone has their own mind on it. Everybody can do what they want with that, but I just, I don’t even know how to comment on the sentence. I don’t know how it’s meant to be. That is the law here. You can’t have an abortion. And I know people may say it’s stupid and things like that but it’s still the law. You have to abide by the law that’s here until that changes. You know, if it changes or if this even makes a change then fair enough, but you break the law, you have to be punished.
“I would have done the same thing no matter what I had have found in the bin. If she had killed a cat, if it was a human body, you know, anything, a dog in the bin, I would still have rung the police. Any living thing I would have rang the police. I would have done the exact same thing. You know, people are getting sentenced for killing dogs and even puppies at the side of the road because that’s breaking the law. There’s an Act against it. So she had put a baby in the bin. That’s breaking the law and there is an Act against it, so she has to be punished. You know it’s the exact same thing. There’s a law for a reason and if people want to get the law changed they can do that but at the minute it’s the law and if you break the law you have to be punished.”