When we were children so many of us were told cautionary tales about sex and its repercussions, stories often so encoded and cleaned up and lacking in courage that they resulted in further confusion, followed by fear. As adults you can look back on such nonsense and find it amusing, if you are lucky, but that is a generous rendition, a letting off the hook of the idiocy of parents.

Girls became sick because they fell through bonnets of cars belonging to fast boys. A girl became desperately unwell because she swallowed a dressmaker's pin. A snakebite was responsible for a girl we knew being in hospital in another city for many months, and we fell for it, this lame explanation,even when she came back changed, beaten down and sad. We were casualties of this type of cruelty, when things were left unnamed.

Years ago, as a political gesture in the battle for legal, safe abortion which we still do not have in our State, a colleague and I conducted an oral history project and asked women to talk about their experience of abortion. Women told us their mostly wretched stories, anonymously, as a way of release from the bad effect of silence, that pain carried heavily throughout life. Here is one of the twenty nine stories we collected.

I became pregnant when I was 18 and I had a daughter. She was adopted out. Within eighteen months or so of this, I was pregnant again, which is a common thing, but I wasn't told that then. There was no way I was going to give away another baby, so I went to my doctor and was given a sound moral lecture. This was in the early 1960s.

I made contact with an illegal abortionist and he performed the procedure on a kitchen table. His method was to insert a catheter, push a piece of wire up through it, and leave it in place for 24 hours, by which time the foetus would abort. He would also provide a bottle of antibiotics. The cost was hundreds of pounds.

I had a second abortion with this man: at the Horror House at the Royal Show, out the back. He was a vaudevillian character, and during the annual Royal Agriculture Show that was where he worked, combining the two roles. The second time the procedure didn't work, and I had to go back to him three months pregnant. On my first day at a new job, I went into labour in the toilets.

I look back on these experiences and think about my inability to come to terms with sexuality as a good Catholic girl, and my desire for sympathy. I think about my shame and determination, and the confusion of my life when I was deciding on how it would go, as well as simply going with the swirling flow. As each period came I was terrified and then disappointed. The carry-over from the adoption was quite haunting, very painful. There was no access to medical treatments available to me, and that included contraception.

When I look back, I wonder how I cut off to that extent. Labour came on after the first abortion on the morning of my sister's wedding, and I was her bridesmaid. I suspect I wasn't feeling anything at all for a couple of years.