A New Life: Bridget Donnelly is a much-needed mother figure for women going through pregnancy and labour alone, writes Michelle McDonagh
To say Bridget Donnelly is dedicated to her work with women in crisis pregnancy is an understatement - her life totally revolves around her "girls" and their babies.
When the phone rings in the middle of the night, Donnelly hops out of bed, dresses quickly and drives to the maternity department at University College Hospital Galway to help yet another frightened young woman through labour and the delivery of their baby.
Donnelly is often the only familiar face at the bedside of a young woman who has been abandoned by the father of the child and shunned by her own family.
To her "girls", Donnelly is something of a mother figure who will hold their hand the whole way through their labour and birth of their baby. If she wasn't there, the experience would be a very lonely one indeed.
It's a world away from the early days of her nursing career when Donnelly spent a lot of time working in the area of extended care with people dying of cancer and other terminal illnesses and, over the years, saw many of her patients die.
Coming from a family of 13, Donnelly had to learn to be resourceful at a young age and she wasn't fazed at all about emigrating to Canada on her own at the age of 18 to study nursing in 1973. She studied nursing in central Canada and travelled coast to coast before settling in Vancouver for eight years.
"In my early years of nursing, I was mostly dealing with the dying which is very different from mainstream nursing. I was caring for people of different faiths and backgrounds from all over Canada. It wasn't easy work but we are all dying in our own way and I learnt a lot from that experience," she explains.
While in Vancouver, Donnelly trained as a counsellor specialising in crisis pregnancy counselling. She met her Irish husband who was working over there as an engineer in the oil business and they had two sons, one each side of the Rockies, before returning home to Ireland after 13 years away.
"We eventually came home because of the children. The Canadian lifestyle wasn't really a safe family place like Ireland at the time, it was geared towards two-income families even back then and Ireland has gone that way now as well."
Back in Ireland, Donnelly had two more children, a boy and a girl, and her family now ranges in age from 11 to 24.
In 1992, when she was pregnant, Donnelly began training as a voluntary counsellor with Life Pregnancy Care in Galway. The non-denominational organisation, which has seven centres in the Republic, offers pregnancy counselling to young women who find themselves in crisis.
"We give information on all the options but we are not a referral service. We do pregnancy tests and sit down with the girls to discuss their situation and offer them counselling," she says.
"The girl might want to discuss keeping the baby, adoption or abortion but, ultimately, it is her decision."
Donnelly says that crisis pregnancy is a tough situation to find yourself in and, regardless of what choice you make, it will not be easy, but there are agencies like Life Pregnancy Care and Cura to help.
Having worked on the ground for years with girls who found themselves pregnant with nowhere to go, no partner and no support, Donnelly identified a gap in the system in terms of crisis accommodation.
She successfully got funding from the Crisis Pregnancy Agency two years ago which has enabled Life Pregnancy Care to provide sheltered supported accommodation for 12 girls in the city.
So far, 30 mothers and babies have been accommodated by Life Pregnancy Care staying for an average of six months. Donnelly has moved from counselling into the area of providing support for the girls in the accommodation.
Although Donnelly is paid to work eight hours a day, in reality she is on call 24 hours, seven days a week to attend labours, deliveries and, of course, false alarms. She was recently nominated as one of the Rehab Galway People of the Year for her work in caring for women in crisis pregnancy over the years.
"Even though giving birth can be a fantastic experience, it can be very hard on the girls when they don't see any familiar faces around them, particularly when the partners and husbands of other women in the ward are coming in with flowers and presents," she says. "It's important that they have somebody they know beside them.
"Babies come into the world totally innocent of everything and these babies deserve the very best, the world should open their arms to welcome them."
With her own family mostly reared and a very supportive husband, Donnelly manages to balance her domestic and work life successfully although she isn't left with much free time for herself.