Ms Liz McDermott:

There is no right answer. To say that people want to make the right decision for themselves is to completely ignore the baby in all of this. It is a separate human life and it is very difficult to airbrush that life out of the narrative. Nobody can say with any real certainty what way things will go for a baby who is sick or results from a crisis pregnancy or whose mother feels very unsupported or cannot face having a baby at that time. Our legal system cannot provide for every eventuality and individualise our laws for that but it is incumbent upon us to support every woman. If we affirm the right to life of children in the womb, the pre-born, we are also supporting their mothers, fathers and families and it is incumbent on us to invest in that in a meaningful way. Ending a pregnancy is ending a life and that is an uncomfortable reality we try to skirt around. We do not like coming up against it but it is a reality. Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I had chosen to have an abortion, gone down that road and listened to the advice around me. A woman at a baptism party asked me had I not had a scan, by which she meant to ask why on earth I had the baby. A dehumanising language is applied to disabled people. We uphold equality and welcome disable people and support the Paralympics and Special Olympics but we do not support women who are facing into a lifetime of caring for those children. I sometimes think about what it would have meant if I had chosen to have an abortion and get rid of John. I would not have had to move house or look for a special car and it would have made life far easier in many ways but I would have missed out on him rolling over at four months and smiling at me and his getting up at nearly two years of age and starting to walk across the floor, which I never expected. It was a complete surprise to me that he could do that. It is not just my family and I who would have missed out but also the wider community. I have brought with me a poem John's sixth class teacher wrote for him when he was leaving. It is called "Ode to John". The teacher is not a man who usually writes poetry. It is an astonishing testament to the life of John McDermott. He is not mine to do anything with and I cannot get past that. Many people in this country think the same way.