Ms Claire Cullen-Delsol:

I will not have anything said about Waterford. It was just a video that I put up because I thought that people needed to see what we are faced with. I lost a baby and none of these images will ever be worse than looking at one's own dead child. At the same time, it is not on. It is awful. There are kids present. I have my own kids. It is normally one of those things where people get together, there are many mothers, all chatting, we go for a little walk, we chant a bit, and then we all go for coffee and cake. I took a video of this horrible counter-protest, having been set up with all these rotten images, and put it online. Thousands of people saw it and commented. Maybe five of the 30,000 or so people who watched that video had something very nasty to say. It is all along the same lines. Much of it has a religious basis, and when that does not sink in, they target people personally. They will say that I am a terrible mother and did not love my baby enough, that if I had enough faith in God, I would not have lost my baby, that if I had loved the baby enough, she would still be here, and that I am using my own dead baby to allow for the deaths of other babies. They call me a murderer and a witch etc. It is a very small number of people. The impact of it at the time varies depending on my own emotional well-being. Sometimes it floors me and sometimes it does not.

In general, the response is amazing. People are fabulous and inherently good. I know we tend to legislate assuming the worst of people but I do not believe that. I think people are genuinely good and that if we give people the opportunity to show their true colours, people are generally fantastic. The support, kindness, care, love and compassion we are capable of is outstanding. It comes from all sides and sectors of society and from all ages. It is fantastic and has got me through some of my worst times. A perfect stranger, someone who used to work with my husband, came up to me when I was queueing for a coffee and said that I was amazing, to keep doing what I was doing and that they were sorry for my loss.

I did not encounter resistance in the medical community. I found it to be incredibly supportive. When I said that I was considering travelling, many people in it said not to consider it yet but to wait and see what happened. They said to wait and see what services I would get and how I got on. I think much of that was more to protect me. As time went on and my condition was deteriorating mentally and emotionally, many said to me that if they could do something for me, they would and that they were sorry I had go through that and that it was not fair. That was the general response that I got.

It goes back to people being generally compassionate. They understand it and they get it. They see it every day and they know. I cannot speak highly enough about the people who took care of me when I was pregnant.

The woman who did my first scan insisted on doing the last one also. She was there. That was one of the reasons I was waiting so long in a room with a pregnant woman. The same woman wanted to be the one to do the scan. She wanted to look after me, and she did. She took loads of pictures for me. She let me be the one to say there is no heartbeat because she knew I needed to take back some of the control at that point. While I was in labour, which took two days, she came in to see me to make sure that I was getting enough pain medication and make sure I was being looked after. The antenatal midwife did the same thing. Both of them popped in and out, with their coats on or with their lunch boxes, when they could. If they could get the time they would come in to see me. When my consultant realised that after 36 hours I still had not given birth, and that after three doses of Misoprostol or whatever it was called, I still was not in active labour but that I was just in pain and waiting, he left the conference he was at in Dublin and drove back down to Waterford. He walked into the room and he said it was Friday afternoon and that if I did not give birth by that evening, I would have to go home for the weekend and come back on Monday. He asked me what I wanted to do. I said I could take the pain and to double the dose and he did. A couple of hours later, Alex was here. It meant I did not have to go home and wait another weekend carrying a dead baby. I cannot speak highly enough of them. Once we give our medical teams the tools and the freedom to take care of people properly, we can trust them to do so.