The truth in regard to the appalling exploitation of the young girl at the centre of the 1997 C-case continues to be revealed. Today on the Pat Kenny Show, the girl, who is a now a young woman, told the nation that she didn’t even know what an abortion was when she was brought by social workers, against the wishes of her parents, to have her baby killed in Britain.
 
In a disturbing interview, during which ‘Mary’, to use her pseudonym, showed great courage, it was revealed that she thought the social workers were going to have her baby delivered. She awoke in pain following the abortion and asked for her baby – who she said she would have given up for adoption.
 
Mary previously told the Irish Star newspaper that she wished her baby had been allowed to live. Now 25, and mother to a five year old boy, she says that she thinks of her aborted baby - who she believes was a girl – all the time. “The child never left my head,” she told the Irish Star.

These revelations are especially shocking because the social workers swore in court at that time that Mary has said she would kill herself if she wasn’t allowed to have an abortion. That is now shown to be utterly untrue, and raises the question: what was the agenda of social workers acting for Mary in 1997 when she was just 13 years old and pregnant as a result of a brutal rape.
 
Mary’s mother told the pro-life group Youth Defence that this claim was untrue at the time of the controversial case, but both the young girl’s parents and Youth Defence became the target of intense and vitriolic media attacks when they spoke out against the abortion.

Mary’s case was extraordinary in that pro-abortion campaigners and the state insisted the young girl should be brought for an abortion, despite the pleas of her parents, who were opposed to the abortion and had only placed their daughter in care to protect her from the rapist who had violated her. The state went as far as to seek, and obtain, a High Court order to allow them to have the unborn child killed. Mary’s parents were refused access to their daughter prior to the abortion. Now it has become clear that the primary reason for the enforced separation of a young rape victim from her own mother and father was to ensure that the abortion sought by social workers went ahead.
 
Niamh Uí Bhriain who was a spokesperson for Youth Defence at the time said this week that Mary had great courage in speaking out about her ordeal. “This public revelation confirms what Mary and her family had revealed to us almost 12 years ago,” she said. “The state has a great many questions to answer, not least why they lied on oath in the High Court, and why they insisted that this young girl wanted an abortion when her own evidence is that she sought no such thing.” Ms Uí Bhriain added that it was horrifying that the young rape victim and her family had been manipulated by the state and by abortion supporters in such a cruel and callous manner. “The truth about what happened has been kept secret for too long; it’s time for the public to know what really happened,” she said.
 
At the time of the C case, Tommy Cullen, a county councillor who was one of the few members of the state-run Health Board who opposed the abortion, said that those with a pro-abortion agenda within the State’s employ were “trawling” the health boards looking for similar cases, in order to further the legalisation of abortion in Ireland. In 1999, the Midland Health Board – another state body – brought a teenager who had become pregnant in their care for an abortion, also against the wishes of her mother.