Professor Veronica O'Keane:

Migrant women have all the vulnerabilities. A migrant woman with an unwanted pregnancy represents a case full of all the vulnerabilities. She is not Irish and probably does not have an Irish passport, although she may be at a point where she does. If she is in direct provision, she certainly does not have any financial means whatsoever. I treated women in the United Kingdom who had been raped in wars and who gave birth secretly because their families would have rejected them had they known they were pregnant, even though the pregnancies were forced and, unfortunately, the result of war crimes.

Women live desperate lives sometimes. There are sub-communities, and there are sub-communities in our own culture in which abortion is utterly unacceptable. If the women in question were living in a more compassionate state, their difficulties might not be as extreme. It arises sometimes in psychiatry that families do not believe in psychosis, for example. We are there to help the patient, however, so we can bring in those families and talk to them. We can explain the circumstances to them and give them the education they might never have received. One wins people around and educates them, and things move on. In this situation, however, there is no possibility of helping the woman who is stranded by her culture and by the absence of services. There is no way of pulling her to safety. Therefore, the absence of services within Ireland particularly affects the women in question.