Former Sinn Féin MEP Martina Anderson has revealed how she underwent an abortion in order not to jeopardise an IRA bombing mission.
The former republican prisoner was 22-years-old in 1985 when she was on the run in the Republic but was preparing to join an IRA unit operating in England.
The former Foyle MLA, who was ordered to stand aside from her seat by the Sinn Féin leadership in 2021, discovered she was pregnant weeks into the planning of the unspecified attack.
However, she confessed that she “was not for letting my comrades down”.
Speaking on RTÉ radio on Sunday to Miriam O’Callaghan, the former MEP said she never expected to make the “painful” episode public but has recalled the circumstances in her autobiography Choosing the Struggle, which is published this week.
She told the presenter how she wanted to write “with honesty, and I hope, integrity”.
“Women like me, who had an unplanned pregnancy, and because of the circumstances that I found myself in, I put the struggle first, and I chose to have an abortion,” she said.
“It was the hardest decision of my life. It was the most painful decision in my life. It didn’t strengthen me making that decision. In fact, it broke me but I was not for letting my comrades down.”
Ms Anderson, who in 1989 married fellow IRA prisoner Paul Kavanagh in Full Sutton Prison, said she has “lived in silence” about her ordeal for more than 40 years.
“I’ve reached a point in my life where I do believe that perhaps – and I don’t know whether it will – but perhaps in the telling of the story, that it might make some small contribution to stopping the social and the moral shaming of women like me,” she said
“I believe the time for social shaming and moral shaming needs to stop.”
The 64-year-old also told how botched surgery during her time at Durham Prison robbed her of the chance to have children after a gynaecologist inmates nicknamed Dr Death removed her womb during an operation to treat polyps.