Father Ted creator Graham Linehan and his wife Helen have spoken out about their abortion story in support of the campaign to decriminalise abortion in Ireland.
Last week, Amnesty International unveiled Chains, their ad voiced by Liam Neeson in support of the Repeal the Eighth campaign.
The video was directed and produced by Graham, and now in a second video released by Amnesty International, the couple have opened up about their own abortion story.
The couple revealed that Helen fell pregnant in 2004 when they were living in London.
However, at eleven weeks they found that the foetus had a fatal condition, acrania, whereby the skull doesn’t fully encase the brain.
They were told the baby would likely survive no longer than an hour or two once outside the womb, and decided to have an abortion, something which Helen knew she would not have access to should she have been living at home in Ireland at the time.
Helen explained: “If I had been here I would have been legally bound to have gone full term in a pregnancy knowing that it wasn’t going to survive.
“These women who are having experiences similar to ours are just being turned away, and Ireland is turning its back on them and letting them deal with their situation themselves.
It’s barbaric, it’s sickening. In a time of need, the neediest time of your life . . . the prolonging of that, of carrying that baby, having to book into all these places, having to fly to them, it’s just ridiculous.”
Watch the full video here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYpRBR93TdU
Video via YouTube/AmnestyInternationalUK
