And story. I remember my backstreet of walking well. How could I forget? I've told my story many times and more often than not the response in Ireland and amongst the Irish impression has been an embarrassed silence. I suppose some find it prurient, like ining it to a hunger striker or even a suicide bomber whose body is used as political weapon. Let's dramatically some see it as merely a kind of attention seeking ploy on my part. Others find it just unbelievable. But it's all true. Looked at the point of view of the many thousands, maybe even more, of Irish women who have aborted over the generations at life today. I'm normal. If numbers were what counted, we would surely be viewed as everyone, as normal as the girl next door. I remember my abortion because in a funny kind of way it's been one of those life experiences that has made me what I am. The story is all too familiar. Girl meets boy, both are lonely in a strange place. They fall in love and she gets pregnant. She panics and quickly falls out of love when he fails to understand her dilemma. The details are a little more unusual. She was an Irish student come odd jobber in London in the early 60s. Having fled in Ireland, she rather grand heelsly thought was too small for her. He was an Igerian law student in tent on returning home to do lofty things. He didn't see anything unusual in a teenager having a baby. After all, women in his family had separated by that age and he had offered to take her back to Nigeria to join them. She liked the idea of travel to Nigeria or beyond, but not to enlist in a very extended family. She wanted a life before babies. And what would her own family say about a black-grant child, whether in Nigeria or London? How would she provide for it? And how would she and the child bear the stigma? The story goes on. She cut herself off from the law student and began a search, lasting months for an abortion in a London which was not yet swinging or even remotely liberal when it came to things like that. It was all too like Ireland, really. Finally, a friend of a friend found a nightclub owner who knew about such things. The abortionist was not quite the wise woman of law. She botched the job several times when the carbollic mix she was either not strong enough or the rubber dooshy employed, failed to find its mark. She dreaded the return to the wise woman's dingy basement flat inside the site of the oval cricket ground in South London. She's never like cricket since. Finally, the extra virus of sunlight so worked their alchemy and she returned to her bedside alone to wait. A massive hemorrhage resulted in her being whisked rather dramatically in a blaring ambulance to say, where is our patients in Prax Street, Paddington late that night? The undoctor was polite but just. He seemed keen to establish the precise medical details she may or may not have supplied through the fog of pain which he said he could do nothing to alleviate. He did, however, follow legal procedure to the letter and had the police question her on success, fully, about the abortionist. Those were the days before the 1967 abortion act. On admission to a large ward full of women who seemed elderly to her youthful eyes, she was cordoned off in a curtain cubicle at the far end of the room and handed a backpan on which she was told to sit. She sat and she labored throughout an endless night punctuated by her groans and the top-tutting commentary of fellow patients, whose gynecological complaints must have seemed to them more acceptable than hers. She suppose she should have been grateful she was not put on the maternity ward as she was later to learn had happened to others like her. Markfuls of bitten bed linen did something to muffle her intrusive noises. Her early morning delivery coincided with the changing of a medical and nursing guard which informed her that she had to shower and then undergo an internal examination. Somehow she managed both. She was told she was suffering from septicemia, a damaged uterus and considerable loss of blood. Worse she was told that she had been a very silly girl. She told them she had enough and marched out like a drunken sailor to the strings of what do you expect of women like that. Looking back on the girl who tottered out of St Mary's onto Praet Street that morning, I remember that I was too numb to think then of anything but immediate survival. In time, all the usual cliches about life never being the same came true. I changed, I got angry, not at myself, but with the system. I spoke out telling my story saying the unsayable. What can I say now more than 40 years on? Is that where Irish women the unsayable still needs to be sent? Women have abortions, abortion must be safe and legal. Big propaganda I think.