Holly* was 12 weeks pregnant when, during a routine ultrasound this summer, the doctor told her that the baby would almost certainly not survive until birth. They had detected anencephaly, a fatal condition where the foetus’s skull does not form, a diagnosis that was confirmed by the senior consultant a week later.

“The moment we were told, we knew that continuing the pregnancy was not an option for us,” Holly told BuzzFeed News. “Particularly because there’s no ambiguity with that diagnosis — there’s no chance of survival.”

But unlike the rest of the UK, in Northern Ireland where Holly and her husband live with their 2-year-old daughter, abortion is illegal unless the mother’s life is at immediate risk.

Women in Holly’s situation who receive a diagnosis of a fatal foetal abnormality (FFA) — often much later in the pregnancy — are faced with the options of carrying the foetus until it dies and having a stillbirth, or arranging to travel to England for an abortion. In some cases of FFA, the foetus may survive the pregnancy but die shortly after birth.

“Myself and my husband didn’t even need to have a conversation about it. For us there was just no way we could put ourselves through the torture of continuing the pregnancy, and be visibly pregnant to the world,” Holly said.

But because there is no access to abortion in Northern Ireland, and the ambiguity of the country’s 156-year-old law means that local doctors could face prosecution if they are believed to have helped a woman to get an abortion even outside the country, Holly found it difficult to make arrangements for the procedure. “We were totally left on our own,” she said.

While she and her husband were vocal about their decision to travel, they were not given any information about how to make the arrangements.

“I don’t know if they didn’t give us information because they felt they couldn’t or because they don’t have it,” she said. “We were encouraged to take our time and think things through, but we knew straight away that there were no other options.”

Last year the Department of Health set up a helpline in collaboration with the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the UK’s largest provider of NHS abortions, to help Northern Irish women access abortion services in England, but Holly said after phoning the number, she still struggled to make the necessary arrangements.

“I had to phone repeatedly and talk to different people,” she said. Because Holly wanted a medical abortion, which involves taking pills that cause the body to expel the pregnancy, she was told she would have to travel to Doncaster, South Yorkshire, which they said had the only abortion clinic that would perform the procedure at her stage of pregnancy.

“I was thinking, I have literally no idea where that is — what even airport would we go to? I just had no clue,” she said.

The next available appointment in Doncaster was eight weeks away. “That’s another two months of being pregnant knowing what we know,” she said. “I read a story about a woman who had a similar diagnosis in the UK and she was booked in for a procedure the next day.”