Claire Cullen-Delsol and her husband, Wayne, with Alex, who was stillborn

A woman has spoken for the first time about the “five weeks of torture” she went through while waiting for her unborn baby to die because of Ireland’s abortion laws.

Claire Cullen-Delsol, 31, a mother of two from Waterford city, had to wait over a month for her daughter’s heartbeat to stop naturally before she could end a pregnancy that had no medical chance of succeeding.

Ms Cullen-Delsol and her husband, Wayne, have an eight-year-old daughter and a 20-month-old son. In August, twenty weeks into her pregnancy, she was told that Alex, her second daughter, would not survive because of a chromosome disorder.

Abortion is illegal in Ireland except in extremely limited circumstances, which do not include fatal foetal abnormalities.

“After they gave us the