She is your sister, your daughter, your mother, your cousin, your colleague, your friend. The chances of you not being acquainted with somebody who has had an abortion are slim, for Irish abortion is an everyday occurrence.

In 1999, 6,214 women stated on a British clinic admission form that they came from the Republic of Ireland, another 1,429 from Northern Ireland. That's an average of 30 Irish women each day on which the clinics are open, not counting those who still give British addresses rather than write down their home address.

So if you think you don't know anybody who's been there, you're probably wrong. It's simply that she didn't tell you. She is forced to slink away to another jurisdiction to avail of services outlawed in her own country - silenced by the torrents of judgment and vilification that are directed at women who make that choice.

Her voice is absent from the abortion debate, in which medical and legal professionals flounder around a territory of exceptions (witness the recent Oireachtas Committee hearings on abortion which used the bulk of the time discussing rape, incest, foetal disability and suicide), while extremists depict her as an unfeeling, sexually-profligate baby-killer.

It's time for a reality check:

An Irish woman travelling to Britain for an abortion is rarely suicidal. Her pregnancy is not generally the outcome of rape or sexual abuse and neither has she any reason to think her foetus might be born with a disability.

Her motives are complex and various and all she shares with the other women flying out of Dublin or Cork or Belfast for an abortion is her deeply-held conviction that giving birth at this particular time is not right for her or for the child she would bear.

As is so clearly demonstrated by the three stories below, women who have abortions are as law-abiding, moral and responsible as any other citizen.

CONCEPTION,

"Anna" a teacher, is 29 now and was 22 when she had her abortion. She has since married the man by whom she became pregnant nine years ago. They have a two-year-old daughter, and Anna is expecting another baby at Christmas.

"Mick and I were only going together about four months when I found I was pregnant. I liked him but it was very early days so I had an abortion and never told him. He had fairly strong ideas on [abortion] and we were so new. We had only had sex about three times and I didn't think the relationship would bear the strain. Also we were both very young - he's a year younger than me - and I had just started teaching. It was the wrong time for me, for us. In every way it was the wrong time."

"FRANCES", a 39-year-old mother of three children had an abortion last year. Her third child, Ross, born in 1998, has Down's syndrome and when he was only seven months, she found she was pregnant again: "another accident". She didn't have amniocentesis before deciding on abortion because going ahead with the pregnancy was "unthinkable", one way or the other.

"We were already finding life very stressful. Ross is adorable but incredibly demanding, and my two other children were three and five. We only ever meant to have two, and I think another would have finished our marriage. Certainly, the other children would have suffered. The older two were already being sidelined as it was. "I always thought I was against abortion but when the time came I didn't have to think twice and neither did Joe [her husband]."

"Susan" is 26, a student and single. "I really like children, and I want a partner and a family but I want it to be right when it happens. Last year, I started doing a law degree, which is like a second chance for me, doing something I really, really want to do - what I should have done in the first place, only I did what my parents wanted instead.

"I got pregnant by an ex-boyfriend. It was off for almost a year but we met up one night at a party. We used a condom and I couldn't believe it when I found I was pregnant. To this day, I don't know how it happened. I couldn't go ahead with it. It didn't work out between me and him, and I couldn't face the responsibility of having a child on my own. "Was that just me being selfish? Maybe, but I also knew the child would have suffered."

Most women seeking abortions in Britain are single and aged between 20 and 29. Between 13 and 14 per cent are married, and a similar number are aged between 16 and 19.

Between 25 and 33 per cent of Irish women seeking abortion already have one or more children.

Over 90 per cent of abortions performed in Britain are classified as category C: "risk to physical or mental health of woman". In many cases, this amounts to doctors pretending to believe the mental health of the woman is at risk if the pregnancy goes ahead.

Abortion law reformists in Britain are campaigning for services to be available on request up to 14 weeks of pregnancy and for any new law to be extended to Northern Ireland, currently exempt from the 1967 Act.

DECISION

Anna: "I spent one sleepless night turning things over in my head but I never really felt I had any option. I told no-one, absolutely no-one. At the time, abortion was probably the hottest topic in the country, and telephone numbers were being bandied about all over the place. It was easy to arrange."

Frances: "I got the telephone number in the Golden Pages of one of the well-known agencies here, rang them up and told them I wanted to go to England for an abortion. They said they couldn't help me unless I came in for counselling. I couldn't afford counselling even if I needed it, which I didn't. The girl on the phone was nice about it, but she said it would be breaking the law to tell me. The `pro-lifers' are always ringing them up trying to catch them out. If the clinic didn't follow the letter of the law, they could be closed down. I got the number from a magazine and went direct."

Susan: "I dithered for about a week. I kept turning over other options in my head, imagining myself telling everybody, imagining myself pregnant and giving up the baby for adoption or keeping it. I think I knew all along what I was going to do but I was resisting it like mad. I went to a clinic and had a talk with a counsellor. She was very careful not to advise me, just to listen, but by the end of the session, I knew what I had to do and she told me how to go about it."

Since the passing of the Regulation of Information Act in 1995, information on abortion services can only be given within the context of counselling. The Act also forbids "advocacy", so any doctor or agency referring a woman to an abortion clinic is breaking the law.

The Act does not require doctors or pregnancy-counselling agencies to provide "non-directive" counselling; they are free to provide counselling either in a non-directive manner or in a manner which is directive away from (but not towards) the option of abortion.

Only three Irish pregnancy-counselling agencies provide non-directive counselling: IFPA, Well-Woman and Marie Stopes. Other agencies, such as Life and Cura, counsel their clients in relation to adoption or lone parenting only. Such organisations tend to receive more funding from government than non-directive organisations. For example, CURA received a grant of £375,000 in 1999 for pregnancy counselling services, while IFPA received £100,000 and Well Woman, £87,000.

About half the women travelling to England for abortion have not availed of counselling, seeing it as unnecessary, expensive or, by some who were unsure of the legal status, unavailable.

TRAVEL

Anna: "It was ironic because I remember thinking that in a way I was glad I was going to England to do it, because I thought it would be more confidential but then it turned out there were two other Irish girls staying at the same B&B. I didn't know either of them, thank God. They seemed to get great solace from each other but I kept my distance. You know how small this country is."

FRANCES: "Having to travel was so difficult to organise. I pretended we were going over for a wedding. Arranging somebody to look after Ross was the worst. In the end, I asked an old friend. At the time, I hadn't seen her for a while but she is a very broadminded type and also she had a sister with Down's. She was absolutely brilliant about it, and it brought us very close together. "I couldn't ask my mother or anybody like that: it was all right lying to her over the telephone but I couldn't have handed her the children and gone off on the plane telling her barefaced lies about where I was going."

Susan: "Telling all those lies, that was the worst of it. At the airport I kept looking around me and even on the plane, I found I kept looking over my shoulder."

Women all over the world travel for abortion. In the 1960s Swedish women took the ferry to Poland; today well-off Polish women go to Lithuania, Kalinagrad (part of Russia) or Holland.

Non-resident women seeking abortion are no longer obliged by British law to stay overnight. One-day travel and subsistence add at least £200 to the cost of an abortion plus similar costs for a companion if accompanied.

ABORTION

Anna: "The operation itself was the most straightforward part. It was over very fast, which of course was what I wanted, but at the same time I found myself thinking, `is that it?' It didn't feel right."

Frances: "I chose a local anaesthetic because you recover more quickly from that. The operation itself was painful but not unbearably so and the pain only lasted a short time. While it was happening, I went through every emotion. I knew I had to do it but I felt so sad at the same time. I was praying, asking him or her to forgive me."

Susan: "I couldn't get over how matter-of-fact they were in the clinic. It was like finding an oasis in the desert, after all the abuse you get here. They took ages with me, gave me all the information I wanted and settled all my worries and let me know I could change my mind up to the last minute. One of them held my hand for the anaesthetic. They just did everything to ease it for me."

Once abortion is performed before the 12th week of pregnancy in legal, regulated circumstances, it is a safer procedure than giving birth, both physically and emotionally.

The average cost of a non-NHS abortion in Britain is £400 sterling, up to 12 weeks' gestation. Later abortions are more costly.

Fewer than five per cent of women who have had an abortion in Britain return for a second one.

Aftermath

Anna: "I never told Mick. When we got engaged I thought about it, but in the end decided not to. I would just have been offloading it, putting the burden on him. Now I know I'll never tell him. Sometimes I feel bad about this, keeping such a big secret and sometimes I get annoyed with him, that I was never able to tell him. I know this is illogical, and it never lasts long. It's usually when I'm annoyed with him about something else. Sometimes, too, I think: if I had that child, he or she would be nine years old now. "It was awful, the worst experience of my life, but if it happened over again, I'm sure I'd do the same."

Frances: "I've tried to draw a line under it and not look back. As far as I'm concerned, I had no other choice. When I hear people discussing abortion now, especially men, I think to myself: you don't know what you're talking about; you haven't a clue. They make me feel sick now when I hear them."

Susan: "I worried about guilt and that, but once it was over I felt nothing except relief. Then, a year later my sister-in-law got pregnant and I don't know why, that just set something off in me. I phoned the clinic and went to see the counsellor again. We had a long chat about my reasons for doing it in the first place. I had nearly forgotten myself why I had done it. "It was not being able to talk to anybody about it that set me off. I'm grand about it now."

About 10 per cent of women return for post-termination counselling, sometimes because the abortion has become a catalyst for other undealt-with trauma.

Statistically, women who have had counselling before the termination make a better adjustment afterwards.

The psychological responses to abortion are far less serious than those experienced by women bringing an unwanted child to term and relinquishing it for adoption.

Only those ambivalent about having an abortion or pressurised by parents or partner are likely to experience regret a year later.