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Carrying your baby to full-term and then giving it away is preferable to terminating the pregnancy for some women, but there’s no ‘easy option’. Here, three mothers tell KATE HOLMQUISTabout putting their babies up for adoption

DOMESTIC ADOPTION is rare in Ireland – only 41 such adoptions occurred in 2008 compared with more than 1,000 per year in the last century. Adoption numbers are not recorded in a 2007 report by the then Crisis Pregnancy Agency. It found that in Ireland most crisis pregnancies resulted in a live birth: 75 per cent of mothers parented the baby, 6 per cent miscarried, 15 per cent had abortions and 1 per cent experienced still births. More than 5,000 women gave Irish addresses at UK abortion clinics in this report.