Sharon is a recovering drug-user aged 26. She has two children under seven and raises them alone. Years of doing drugs meant she had got involved with some difficult people, the kind of people she is now trying to keep out of her life.
Two months ago, the future caught up with her.
It was her grandparents' wedding anniversary, and they were celebrating in a room above a pub a few miles away from Sharon's flat. Sharon doesn't drink alcohol because she doesn't want to swap one addiction for another and, anyway, her liver is compromised by the hepatitis C she contracted during her lost years.
Usually, she doesn't even socialise except maybe to her friend's flat for a video.
Just past closing time, the brother of a woman who went to the same treatment centre arrived at the party. To cut a long story short, he offered to give Sharon and her grandparents a lift home. He dropped them off first, and then drove to Sharon's. The children were staying with her friend upstairs.
Sharon became pregnant.
The consequences for her liver were really serious, her doctor said, and she should think carefully about her health. Sharon was in shock. She'd known the hepatitis C meant she would not live past her fifties, but she hadn't been on the pill because she thought she didn't need to be. So she spoke to someone who knew how to get to Liverpool for an abortion.
The problem was that the travel and procedure would cost more than £600.
Sharon's income consists of £81 a week social welfare, £34 for the two children and £8 fuel allowance. Her expenditure starts with local authority rent of £32, then food, gas, electricity, the other bare necessities, plus a weekly repayment to the moneylender she used to pay for her daughter's communion dress.
It had all got on top of long before this: she admitted to her doctor that the scars on her arms and torso came from cutting herself with a breadknife on nights she nearly died of loneliness. She loved her children, but she couldn't take another pregnancy.
Bertie Ahern's proposed Human Life in Pregnancy Bill won't let Sharon's doctor recommend an abortion for her in Ireland unless she is guaranteed to die during the exact term of the pregnancy, rather than months or years later.
Even if she becomes suicidal, Ahern will gamble with her life rather than respect the damage her illness will do.
Sharon's doctor mentioned the case at a dinner party soon after he saw her. Given her fragile condition and history, what could he do to help, he asked a solicitor friend. He said that anyway, he would worry about sending a potentially suicidal patient out of the country where he could not care for her. Was there a way he could even talk to a doctor in Liverpool to make sure there was some continuity of care?
The solicitor said that the doctor would face criminal charges if he was in any way implicated in discussing the mental or physical health of an Irish woman seeking abortion in Britain. Nor could he organise an ultra-sound scan afterwards to make sure his patient was free of other risks.
Then they played a macabre party game. What other countries had similar abortion restrictions? Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the like. What women suffer most from depression after abortion? Women whose countries deny them access at home. The realisation almost ruined the night.
Last week, the solicitor phoned the doctor to ask him over for Sunday lunch.
He had been thinking about the case and noticed that although the new Bill guaranteed the freedom to travel abroad for an abortion, it did not assert the right to do so. In other words, it was discriminatory because the freedom was derived not from any innate liberty but from the amount of money you had in your pocket.
As a matter of principle, it was very unfair, the two professionals agreed, but career-wise, they might be better off keeping quiet.
The doctor foresaw a future where he became a consultant in general practice or community health; the solicitor's client list included a major religious order about to sell off its property portfolio.
Any whiff of sympathy for women like Sharon and their reputations could suffer: there's always someone ready to do you down.
The characters in this story are composites drawn from real life. I've worked with women like Sharon and spoken with professionals in these quandaries. If you ask them why they won't go public, many say they feel intimidated.
Bertie's Bill plans to ground their fears in constitutional fact because it threatens to criminalise them. This is the act of a bully state.
Sharon's dilemma now is how to raise the money. She already knew she'd have to go back to the moneylender to give the children any kind of Christmas, but the cost of travelling over to Liverpool added to the cost of what she already owes makes that dangerous.
Her neighbour told her about a girl they went to school with who raised the money by going on the game for a few nights. Sharon swears she'd never stoop that low - so far.
mruan@irish-times.ie