Derry woman seeking an abortion received ‘no support at all’ from GP

A Derry GP allegedly made a woman seeking an abortion 'feel disgusting' while refusing to direct her towards abortion services.

The allegation was made in Amnesty International’s Legal but not local: Barriers to accessing abortion services in Northern Ireland report.

According to the report, Susan (not her real name), from Derry, needed an abortion in summer 2022. After having a baby earlier that year, she explained that she could not handle another child at that moment, either emotionally or financially.

Quoted in the report, Susan said she received no help from her GP.

“The impression I got was, you’re pregnant, you’ve done this. So you deal with it, more or less. There was no support at all. Like it was judgmental,” she said.

“Before the GP I was obviously already battling with myself because of fear. I was brought up on my own beliefs. Like I was, it was a process I was fighting with myself. And I felt that my GP would have helped me feel more easy or comfortable with it, but it just made it worse. It made me feel disgusting.”

Susan called her GP and when she told the receptionist that she was calling to get an abortion, it took the GP one week to call her back.

When she did call, the conversation lasted 'about five minutes' and the GP initially ignored it when she repeated she wanted an abortion. Instead she said they pushed her to make an appointment for a scan, telling her what she needs to do to have a ‘healthy pregnancy and healthy baby’.

Susan told Amnesty that when she spoke to her doctor they said: “Oh, you’re pregnant! They’ll give you a scan and then you need to take this supplement that helps the baby’s bones grow, we want you to have a healthy baby, you know, you want to have a healthy pregnancy,” and “I’ve done your postscript for folic acid and multivitamins.”’

After her GP 'consistently ignored' her wishes for help Susan says she was eventually told there was nothing they could do.

“The doctor said something along the lines of 'we can’t actually facilitate abortion or anything. The GPs haven’t actually got the means to facilitate it, unless extreme circumstances.’”

“Then I was left out on my own, with no information, no phone number, nothing.’ She said she felt judged by the GP, who made her feel like she was doing something wrong.

In the end, Susan miscarried, but when she was seeking an abortion, she was treated 'disrespectfully' by her GP who provided no information and refused to signpost her to abortion services.

Lack of information

The report claims a lack of official and comprehensive information about abortion services in the North allows misinformation to flourish.

It says women seeking information online come across crisis pregnancy centres run by anti-abortion, 'rogue agencies', such as Advocate Women’s Centre in Derry or Stanton Healthcare in Belfast.

A doctor who provides abortion services explained: “A lot of it’s word by mouth for patients; or they go on Google. But then if they Google, a good portion end up at Stanton.”

Staffing shortages are a significant problem in sexual and reproductive health according to the report. Dr Cubitt, an SRH provider, notes that in many trusts ‘senior SRH doctors retired and were never replaced. Services have just been allowed to go down.’

This problem impacts the Western Trust in particular, which has difficulty recruiting doctors, generally, to work in the trust, particularly in the rural parts of the trust.

Amnesty said 'nearly every single person' who spoke to them for the report mentioned anti-abortion activists as a 'significant issue and barrier to accessing abortion services'.