Saoirse Aylward has been promised by Fine Gael TDs Emer Currie and Barry Ward that a law named for her little son, Jax, will be drafted by the end of March. Jax died at 31 weeks in his mother’s womb as a result of careless driving causing a collision.
The perpetrator, Yurii Dudek, who has been sentenced to six months for careless driving, was distraught and remorseful. He took full responsibility for the baby’s death. Jax had a postmortem, a funeral and a stillbirth certificate.
None of this mattered under Irish law. Jax’s death could only be classified as an injury to Aylward, his mother. Already battered by grief, this was a further shock and deep suffering for Aylward and Jax’s father, Nathan Ferguson-Murphy, and their daughter.
Now Aylward and her family have been promised that this will not happen to another family, that the law will be changed to reflect the common sense recognition that even though he never lived outside her body, Jax existed. Someone should be held accountable for his death, and that of others like him.
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We have not moved on much since the 1998 Omagh bombing. Coroner John Leckey agreed that 31 people died as he believed Avril Monaghan’s twin babies, Eimear and Evelyn, were “living, healthy babies, though unborn”. But legally, even at seven months of pregnancy, they were outside his jurisdiction.
Aylward has been supported by Colleen Langan, whose aunt Róisín Connolly died in 2010 in a collision when 26 weeks pregnant with baby Catherine. Susan Gray, founder of Parc Road Safety Group, asked Langan whether baby Catherine’s death had been included in the 2010 Road Safety Authority statistics. When Langan checked, she found five male children aged 0-9 recorded, but no girls. She was appalled that baby Catherine didn’t exist in official records.
Parc has a particular interest in how road fatalities are recorded. Parc member David Walsh, now deceased, had suffered the loss of his daughter, Mary Enright from Dungarvan, Co Waterford, in a car crash in 2012. Mary was 34 weeks pregnant with Mollie, his grandchild, and he campaigned for recognition of Mollie’s death by a death cert and in Road Safety Authority statistics. It took four years.
Under Irish law, unless birth had happened, it could not be an officially recorded death, but a stillbirth. A coroner decided in 2016 that a death certificate could be issued for the couple’s unborn daughter Mollie.
The family applied to the High Court to have the decision confirmed but later withdrew the case as they felt that they had done everything possible to have Mollie recognised as a person whose loss was incalculable.
While legislation has been promised swiftly for Jax, it is already troubling that it will cover cases when the mother is at least 23 weeks pregnant or the baby is 400g, echoing stillbirth legislation.
Caroline Smith and her family fought for years to have that legislation updated. Her son, Stephen, was born at 20 weeks and two days, weighing 420g, in October 2015. At the time, to be certified as having lived, the legislation required babies to weigh 500g and be 24 weeks old. It was eventually amended in July 2024 to 400g or 23 weeks old. This leaves people whose babies were 398g or who were 22 weeks and six days still unable to register a stillbirth. People will argue that there has to be some cut-off point in law. Smith believes that it should be after a doctor confirms a pregnancy.
Speaking about unborn babies and their right to be recognised as people who can be victims of a third party’s crime is likely to worry pro-choice people that this is a ploy to roll back abortion rights.
But both Aylward and Langan are adamant that this is not about divisions between pro-life and pro-choice views.
They are absolutely right. This issue transcends those concerns. In fact, it provides an opportunity for people who disagree on abortion to work together on something important that they all agree on.
Aylward has said that she has received cross-party support. Indeed, some people are shocked that recognition does not yet exist.
Both women are understandably keen to focus on traffic fatalities, but logically, it should extend to all unborn victims of violent crime.
Women’s Aid identifies pregnancy as a key time for domestic violence and abuse, and has established partnerships with four major maternity hospitals because they believe domestic violence afflicts more women than conditions like pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes.
There should also be consensus around the need to recognise that a death has happened when a man has brutally beaten a pregnant woman until she loses her baby.
Or when someone like Blaine Parker beats his girlfriend to the extent that the judge said that he treated her like a punchbag, leaving her unrecognisable and in fear for her life. She felt compelled to have an abortion after he threatened her.
That should appal all of us, no matter what our views.
In these cases, differences can be set aside. The families of Jax, Catherine, Mollie, Eimear, and Evelyn deserve no less than to have all our support.
