Mostly, ASN provides grants to women like Roisin who are unable to save up the full amount in time. These grants have ranged from £27 to £1,593 and are predominantly used to pay abortion clinics for a procedure, but have also been used to cover flights and accommodation. According to its most recent figures, in 2015 ASN provided 154 people with £43,484 of funding – raised almost entirely from private donors, many of whom are women the charity has previously supported – and helped get more than £8,500 knocked off clinics’ already discounted rates.



Roisin managed to scrape together around £200 towards the cost of her abortion and ASN paid the rest, as well as providing her with a night of accommodation with one of its volunteer hosts.

“ASN were incredible," she said. "I wish I could tell more people about how good they were. I cannot thank them enough for what they did for me."

Travelling on a late flight from Dublin to Liverpool, Rosin said she went into “robot mode”, desperate to power through the next 24 hours and then put the experience behind her. “I felt like I was a fly on the wall of my own life at that point,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe this was happening to me and just kind of switched off. I was so desperate that I think that was my only way to cope.”

In the departure lounge, an excitable group of women sat opposite her, laughing as they waited to board a flight to popular holiday destination: Malaga, Spain. “I just remember really resenting them and wishing I was one of them,” she said. “Of course, none of them had any idea why I was going to Liverpool.”

Her volunteer ASN host collected Roisin from the airport and took her home, where she gave her dinner and a bed for the night. In the morning the host drove her to the clinic.

Sitting in the waiting room, Roisin said she realised there was a “trifecta of women” who travel from Ireland to England for an abortion. “There’s the woman who is pregnant with a child that has a fatal foetal abnormality and can’t continue the pregnancy, there’s someone like me whose life is just not ready for it, and there’s also the women who already have children and just don’t want any more,” she said. There were two other Irish women waiting with Roisin for a procedure at the clinic in Liverpool that day, and she learned that they were in those other two situations. “In that moment we were that trifecta.”

When the procedure was over, the host brought her home to recover with a hot water bottle and a few hours on the sofa before it was time to head back to the airport for an evening flight home.

“She was just so lovely, and made me feel like I was at home in her home,” Roisin said of her host. “We ended up watching Gogglebox – mindless TV – because I just wanted to switch off. She was phenomenal.”

Offering a comfortable home from home is one of the most important things about being an ASN host, one who preferred to remain anonymous told us. “You’re meeting someone who could be having one of the worst days of her life,” she said.

Over the past two years she has hosted around one woman per month, and said there was no typical case. “Sometimes people will come and just sit on the sofa and cry all night and they won’t want to speak at all, and then other times it can be just like having a friend visit,” she said. “You’re just sort of there if they need you.” Usually that means simply freeing up time and offering whatever support feels like is needed at the time. “It can be lonely and scary to be alone in a new city, so it can be nice to be greeted by a friendly face, or at least someone who knows where they’re going,” the host said.

Flying home, Roisin noticed one of the women from the clinic waiting room was on the same plane. “You read things in the newspapers about x amount of women travelling every day, and x amount of Irish women do this, and everyone just seems like statistics. But it really hits home when you’re sitting there and you are one of those women.”