In the toilets of Caredoc in Waterford in the early hours of April 22nd, 2018, a 19-year-old woman secretly, and alone, gave birth to a full-term baby girl and hid her in a white foot-pedal rubbish bin under a pile of bloodstained tissues.
The woman¸ Caitlin Corcoran, had gone to Caredoc on the Cork Road with her mother and grandmother sometime after 2am after she felt unwell.
Once there, the three women were buzzed into the building. Inside, they waited in the empty waiting area before the woman and her mother, Caroline Corcoran, went into the doctor’s consultation room where she was seen by Dr Adel Abdulrazak.
As Corcoran had constipation and lower abdominal and back pain, the doctor — who had been working for Caredoc since 2011 — asked her to provide a routine urine sample, suspecting a urinary tract infection. He didn’t examine the patient directly but felt she wasn’t telling him her main complaint. In conversation with her mother, the question of a potential pregnancy was raised.
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Caitlin Corcoran went to the bathroom, just across the corridor from Dr Abdulrazak’s office. She walked through the first door, then the second door into the single bathroom. There, she spent just 13 minutes, and gave birth, without making a sound, unnoticed by anyone in the large building. Her grandmother sat waiting in the seating area and for two or three minutes the grandmother was seen on CCTV outside the toilet door.
Returning to the doctor’s office, Corcoran said she could not provide a urine sample and handed back the empty bottle. She never mentioned anything about the baby in the bin, whom she later named Sophie Elizabeth Corcoran.
Having received a referral letter to attend University Hospital Waterford (UHW), the women left Caredoc. By the time they got to the Ardkeen hospital 30 minutes had passed since the birth.
In his referral letter, Dr Abdulrazak noted severe back pain, constipation, and stated “Pregnant” with a question mark.
Three hours later, Corcoran was transferred from the emergency department to the maternity ward. There, she denied giving birth and engaged in a fiction that she was 25 weeks pregnant.
During a conversation with Dr Annie O’Leary, she said she had planned on hiding the pregnancy and giving the child up for adoption. A scan was taken but no baby was seen. Examining her externally, Dr O’Leary noticed signs of a perineal tear, an indication of recent childbirth.
Staff midwife, Bríd Walsh expressed concern Corcoran had concealed delivery of a child, while the woman mentioned having had pains and haemorrhaging in the Caredoc toilet to specialist registrar Catherine McNestry.
Having quickly noticed vaginal tearing, Dr McNestry questioned the patient who denied she had recently given birth and insisted she had a history of vaginal bleeding, before Dr McNestry spoke to the woman’s mother, with the patient’s consent.
Sometime between 6am and 7am the hospital became convinced what they were being told wasn’t true. Gardaí were alerted at 7.25am. Caredoc was also called.
Concerned that a baby had been delivered in Caredoc, Garda Alan Magner, dispatcher in the divisional communications room, called the 24-hour GP out-of-hours service and asked them to check bathrooms that could have been used by the public. In a speedily organised search a substantial amount of blood staining was found by retired garda and Caredoc employee James Hennessy in the toilet opposite Dr Abdulrazak’s office, but nothing else.
Told not to touch anything more by Garda Magner, Mr Hennessy did not open the bin and put up a sign to prevent others from using the toilet. Uniformed gardaí were dispatched to the scene. Once there, they noted bloodstains on the toilet seat, the sink and two bins in the bathroom. An investigation of the sewerage drains revealed nothing. Garda inspector Donal O’Donohoe looked inside one bin and saw blood-stained tissue.
He did not interfere with the contents, but lifted the bin and noted it was heavy. “At the time I was looking for a sign of life and there was no sign,” he told Waterford Circuit Criminal Court when he gave evidence last October.
When gardaí arrived at UHW shortly after 9am, the woman doubled down on the story that she had told since the early hours of the morning. Her baby girl Sophie was not found until after 1pm by scene of crime investigators.
Dr Sean McBrinn of Waterford Medical Centre confirmed the baby, who appeared to be full-term, was deceased, noting there were no signs of trauma.
In her second witness statement made to gardaí after the discovery, Corcoran admitted the baby was hers. She said she had torn the umbilical cord using tissue. She had picked the baby up, and placed it in the bin.
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She said she had not checked for a sign of life, or the sex of the baby, adding she did not hear any sound from the baby before placing her in the bin.
In August 2017 Corcoran had told her partner Shane Noblett she thought she was pregnant, but gave little more information. The man offered money for a pregnancy test and a doctor’s appointment. But she refused both offers.
Leading up to the delivery, he went about his business and didn’t have much contact with the woman. By that time, he accepted it was obvious to everyone, including himself, that she was pregnant. However, she maintained it wasn’t the case and he had to accept the facts that he was given. Put to him that he had certain responsibilities as the father, he said he wasn’t given the opportunity to express his feelings. “I was told I was wrong. I suspected otherwise,” he said.
He denied doing nothing, saying he did what was within his “rights and capabilities to do about it” and said he would have taken care of the child.
In late 2017 her mother became suspicious that her daughter was pregnant and offered help, but her daughter refused to admit she was pregnant or take a test.
In early 2018, Corcoran attended her GP, Dr Tadhg O’Carroll at St Philomena’s Doctors, Marian Park, Tycor, for treatment for a respiratory infection. But he did not notice any signs of pregnancy because she was deliberately wearing baggy clothes.
A few weeks later the mother brought her daughter to the GP practice where she expressed concern to practice nurse Ruth Flynn that her daughter was pregnant. Ms Flynn tested the sample, but it proved negative. The young woman returned on her own and another pregnancy test also showed a negative result. Later she admitted she had tampered with the tests.
The evening before she went into labour Corcoran attended a christening, getting home at 11pm. Her back pain was getting worse and she felt a strong and heavy pressure.
In the early hours, she told her grandmother she was constipated and had back pain. Soon, the three — daughter, mother and grandmother — were on their way to Caredoc, with Corcoran having sought an appointment by telephone.
During the hours she spent in UHW she texted a friend from her hospital bed to say she had miscarried. Her friend encouraged her to be “truthful and honest”, telling her that all of her friends had tried to get her to admit she was pregnant.
In August 2018, Corcoran was arrested and interviewed twice by gardaí. She accepted she had been pregnant some months before giving birth, but said she had not told anyone, or sought medical help.
When the baby was born and dropped into the toilet, she was still attached to her, before she broke the umbilical cord in her tissue-covered hands. She had picked the baby up, she said, cleaned herself up, and held her baby in her left hand.
When asked if the baby had squealed or cried, she replied “nothing”. During the 10 minutes she held her, the baby was not alive, and she did not hear her breathe: “No, there was nothing.”.
She panicked and considered walking out of the toilet with her and saying something, but she did not. Throughout, she insisted that the foetus had stopped moving months into the pregnancy.
When asked what triggered her to put the baby in the bin, Corcoran replied, “I honestly don’t know”.
Her actions, she said, were “stupid. I was acting like a child.” She had let her daughter down. She said she was in denial.
Dr Michael Curtis, former deputy state pathologist, who prepared a joint forensic and paediatric pathology report noted slight bruising in keeping with a difficult delivery or birth trauma.
There was evidence the baby girl had breathed after birth, with air present in the lungs and stomach. Her death was attributed to inattention at birth.
Professor of neonatology and consultant neonatologist Naomi McCallion said the baby established breathing over the first few minutes of life. She believed all that would have been required was stimulation, feeding to prevent hypoglycaemia and keeping the child warm.
During the trial, defence witness Dr Catherine Conlon, assistant professor of social policy at Trinity College Dublin, advanced the argument of a concealed pregnancy and drew on the Ann Lovett case of 1984.
Ciaran O’Loughlin SC, defending, argued that virtually everyone, bar Corcoran, knew she was pregnant. On every occasion, she denied the pregnancy but nothing was done by anyone around her. “The child ought to have been able to grow up, ought to have its first day at school ... that will never happen and fingers need to be pointed in relation to that,” he said.
In fairness, he said the mother was trying to help but things reached a point where the relationship became poisonous.
Understanding the mother was at her wit’s end, he said there wasn’t any real help from the family. The friends tried to but didn’t get anywhere. In sharing his thoughts about the family, GP, the nurse, Caredoc doctor and Gardaí, he said there was an ascending order of responsibility.
“There were four places the baby could have been in that room — in the basin, in the toilet bowl or in one of the two bins,” he said. “The fact that there was a baby there must have been known at the very latest of eight o’clock and nothing was done to retrieve the child until at 1.30pm. I suggest to you fingers could be pointed there.”
According to Mr O’Loughlin the prosecution was brought to cover something that was the consequence of “gross negligence in the medical field and on the Garda field in the early hours of that morning”.
Gross negligence manslaughter
However, the State argued it couldn’t be said that inaction on the part of others was what had substantially caused the death of the baby. In simple terms, the case brought against Corcoran was one of gross negligence manslaughter. In law, it is accepted that there is a duty of care owed by a mother to her child.
After a two-week trial in October, she was found guilty of manslaughter with sentencing adjourned for various reports. A majority verdict of guilty was returned for a child neglect charge.
In a letter read out in court at the sentencing hearing, Corcoran said she grew up in an abusive household. She claimed she was beaten and punched by her father. When she got pregnant the father of the baby wasn’t supportive, she said, and she felt alone.
She continued to deny she was pregnant to anyone who asked and was fearful of her father’s reaction. She claimed she was in a state of denial, but is now living with the consequences. She wished the circumstances were different at the time and deeply regrets what happened.
Noting it was a sad and complex case, Judge Eugene O’Kelly said baby Sophie was neglected, and left to die by the one and only person who knew of her birth, her mother.
He made the comments during the sentencing hearing of now 23-year-old Caitlin Corcoran, formally of Mount Suir, Gracedieu, Waterford city, and now of Castleblaney, Mullinavat, Co Kilkenny, who can be identified due to a recent amendment to the legislation.
The judge noted that it was not an offence to conceal a pregnancy. He didn’t regard the deception as an aggravating factor in a manslaughter case but would have if it was a case of infanticide.
The court heard that Corcoran was bullied as a youth and coped by ignoring negative aspects of her life. From psychiatric reports, it was noted that she went into subconscious denial about her pregnancy. She is also suffering from depression and post-traumatic symptoms following the birth.
The judge said what transpired in the toilet of the Caredoc office went against the grain of the “natural instincts of any parent”, but a probation report noted little risk of her reoffending.
He said the appropriate sentences for the counts of manslaughter and neglect were of four-year concurrent sentences. Taking the mitigating factors and relevant personal circumstances into account, the judge reduced the sentences by nine months.
He said the question must be asked if society benefited from a person like Corcoran, who has no previous convictions, serving that length of a sentence. For a multitude of reasons, he was satisfied that a nominal prison sentence would suffice.
He suspended the final three years of the total sentence for a period of three years on several conditions, leaving Corcoran three months to serve in prison.
