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DUBLIN - FETUS TERMINATION THE FUN WAY

When my girlfriend got pregnant, instead of getting an expensive abortion, we managed to drink, bump, and pop our little fetus away in less than three days. We had an unplanned miscarriage that lasted about four minutes. Guilt-free and released from the trauma of undergoing a hospital procedure, we managed to emerge from an unexpected pregnancy with no baby and no hard feelings.

Living in a world free from the fear of a draft card dropping through the letter box, there is nothing, except maybe landing a prison sentence or a terminal disease, as terrifying as finding out your lady is preggers. Maria and I had a lot of sex one drunken weekend in April and she knew immediately, in that spooky extra-perceptual way that women know when you want to screw their best friend, that she was pregnant. Much like remembering to set the recorder on a digital TV in a house fire, we managed to pick up aspirin for our hangovers that morning, but no morning-after pill for our baby.

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When we eventually did go to get it–a good 24 hours too late–the nurse made her take a pregnancy test and, hooray, she was expecting. Waiting for our abortion pill, we met a French girl with a Uruguayan boy. They'd only hooked up the night before and the guy was flying out on Monday; here they were under UV lights when they should have been out drinking wine and jumping each other in parks all over the city. We started talking to each other because we were the only four people there not attached to piss bags or bleeding into something.

We felt bad for the two of them so we said we'd get the medicine as the nurses at the Dublin sex clinic always give you more morning-after pills than you need (probably based on the fact that anyone who wants them is a bit stunned, hungover, sex-shattered, and liable to lose anything smaller than a toilet seat). Then, we agreed, we'd meet them next door in the pub, split the cost of the pills, the girls could go do their thing, and we'd get the drinks in and celebrate the completion of a successfully executed mission. To Sophie and Carlos, apologies for not turning up at the pub as promised, and I hope you didn't drink for too long before realising we'd bounced. And I really hope you don't now have to look after a human for the rest of your lives, but they wouldn't let us have any pills anyway.

In Ireland, abortions are illegal. So when Irish people want one, they've got to make the trip to England, usually London. There are abortion agencies who handle everything for you, including an airport pick-up. They drop the happy mother at a clinic and the proud father at a bar stool, and have you cut, pasted, and back on the next flight to Catholic Ireland before you can say "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." All in, including airport snacks and a couple of trashy mags to fill the awkward, shamed silence, you're looking at the likes of £1,200. We probably could have scraped that together, but by the time we came around to think about it next there was already no need, as we'd managed to kill our homemade bundle of love all by ourselves.

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It started off with raw fish. Sushi, as it's not cooked, has a high chance of containing parasites. Large fish, the kind that contain metals like mercury in their body are the most dangerous. We went for dinner and she ordered tuna, which is so metallic that it might as well have swam onto her plate with a white perm and a Harley-Davidson vest. Before we went for dinner we'd gone back to hers to scrub clean the smell of the hospital. Maria got changed into a pair of heels and tight leggings after taking a shower hot enough to cook lobsters.

After dinner we went back to mine where I had a bag of Nepalese Valiums that had got crushed to powder in transit. We washed a couple of handfuls of them down with wine. The wine tasted good so we bought a bottle of vodka and then our mood got so much better that we decided to go out, and we ended up at a club where Maria scored some speed. Speed is about as hard to get hold of in Ireland as abortion information, so if you find it, you take it. Now, it wasn't like we were trying to kill off the kid, but we knew we'd eventually get an abortion so keeping the womb healthy wasn't a huge priority for us.

Over the next two days, we went through a couple of wraps of nasty speed and shat our bodyweight. On the morning of day three of the binge, sitting at a lock-in somewhere south in the city, Maria came back from the bathroom and tapped me on the shoulder. She wanted me to see something. I followed her, stepped inside the cubicle, and there, staring back up at us, floating in a slim pool of toilet paper and pee, like a boiled chop in Ragu sauce, was our baby. Maria's tough; me, not so much. We went back to the bar, finished our drinks, smoked a last cigarette, and then I asked if we could go home.

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Maria and I didn't last an awful lot longer as a couple. The sex became more preventative than anything else: double bagging, pulling out, just using our hands, that kind of thing. But I'm sure going for an abortion probably would have been even shitter, and at least this way we managed to save some cash and we got to ride a wave of sympathy for losing a baby rather than judgment for getting it terminated.

Little ones in the first trimester are about as fragile as paper planes. A strong espresso could cause a miscarriage… but if you want to be sure of the

coup de grace,

it's best to follow that coffee with valium, speed, laxative, vodka, no sleep, no food, dancing, a few tumbles and a thin slice of far-from-cooked tuna.

CONOR CREIGHTON