She Is Twenty-Two and She Is Not Going Quiet
The room at the Gresham Hotel was full.
Hundreds of people sat in rows on O'Connell Street last weekend. Then a young woman walked up to speak.
Her name is Philomena Tierney. She is 22.
"As a 22-year-old, I think a lot about the type of country that my generation is growing up in," she said.
"One thing that concerns me is how many women facing an unplanned pregnancy are let down."
She didn't shout. She didn't need to.
"They deserve the information, support and time they need to make an informed decision. But too often, that just isn't happening."
Time is exactly what is being argued over in Leinster House right now.
Sinn Féin's bill would abolish the three-day wait between a woman's first abortion appointment and the abortion itself. It passed Second Stage in the Dáil in June. The Oireachtas Health Committee has been examining it since.
The committee heard from the HSE. It heard from doctors. It did not hear from the women who went to that first appointment, used those three days, and went home still pregnant.
They asked to speak. They were refused.
So they spoke somewhere else, at an event called Unheard Voices. Aontú TD Paul Lawless was in that room.
"I had the privilege of meeting women who had attended their first abortion appointment, experienced the three-day waiting period and ultimately decided to continue their pregnancies," he told the conference.
"No political argument could have brought home the significance of the three-day wait more powerfully than that gathering."
Then he said what a lot of people in that hotel were thinking.
"These women deserve to be heard. Their children matter. Their experiences matter. Their voices matter."
Eilís Mulroy of the Pro Life Campaign put it more bluntly. She called the hearings "a fiasco or a travesty". She said that would be "a monumental understatement."
She said the committee has "no credible evidential basis" for sending the bill on. She asked its sponsors to "do the honourable thing and shelve it."
Clondalkin councillor Linda de Courcy spoke about the thousands of women who never came back after the wait. She asked people never to let themselves be "bullied" into silence. She asked for more real support for women facing an unplanned pregnancy.
That's the part that stays with you.
This was not a room full of anger. It was a room full of people asking for time, support and a hearing.
Think about a woman sitting in a GP's waiting room with a card in her hand and three days ahead of her. What would you want her to have in those three days: a deadline, or someone to talk to?
Philomena finished with a picture of the Ireland she wants. She wants a country "where women receive the support they deserve, honest conversations are encouraged, and every human life is treated with dignity."
Somewhere in Ireland tonight there are toddlers asleep in cots who exist because their mothers had three days.
They can't come to a committee room. They can't give evidence.
But they were never silent. Someone just has to be willing to listen.
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