She Was a Midwife. Now She's Exposing the System That Betrayed Women

The Belfast Express wasn't just a train, it was women risking everything to take back control of their bodies. In 1970s Ireland, contraception was illegal and many women had little control or choice over their bodies. Pregnancy was often an expectation shaped by religion, culture, and law. Today I'm speaking with former midwife and author Brigid Carrick, whose novel The Belfast Express draws on her experience caring for women during that time. This is a conversation about what life was really like for women then and why those experiences still matter now. Welcome, Brigid. Great to have you here.

Thank you for inviting me, Rita.

You're welcome. What an experience you've had in life to have lived in Ireland back then and experiencing what it was like for women. And like I said in the introduction, Such little choice. What was it like training as a nurse or a midwife in Ireland in the 1970s when contraception was illegal?

I didn't know that other people lived a different life to the life we lived. And training as a nurse, I left home at 18, and we lived in the nurses' home for 4 years while we were training. Midwifery was different. Midwifery was a 1-year course we didn't have to live in, and part of the course was the delivery of 20 babies. 3 of those babies had to be delivered on the district in the woman's home. And when it became my turn to go on to the district, I was led by the supervisor, like everybody else was, into the slums of Dublin.

Oh my.

And I didn't even know that these places existed. They were never talked about. And the Catholic Church would preach every Sunday about the honour it was to be poor. Jesus was poor. He wasn't actually that poor and not as poor as The women that I have to look after. I mean, my mother knew these places existed, but she'd never been into any of them. And she had never, ever mentioned that these places existed. And so it was really an eye-opener to see all these people living in one room in the slums. There was different types of slums. There were Georgian houses, and they became tenements, and families were living in one room there. But the one I chose to set the story in was called Corporation Place.

Corporation Place.

And that was a compound. Only the people who lived there went in and out there, or unless you had a very good reason to go in there.

Sounds like it would've been dangerous.

Yes, it could have been, especially at the weekend. If the men got some work during the week, and they had some money, well, where did men go when they had money back then? Oh, not just Irish men, but others. They went to the pub, and then came home. Of course, we all know what happens when men come home drunk. The compound was locked with 2 iron gates, but it wouldn't have stopped be locked from the outside by the police to stop the fights coming out into the street. I went there in the middle of the night with another midwife when we would be called, and we were always safe because they never— no one ever interfered with the midwives.

Lucky for you.

Yes, they knew, everyone knew why we were there, and especially in the middle of the night.

From that experience, do you feel that obviously women in these compounds and in the slums didn't have any agency over their own body, whether she wanted to be pregnant or not. It sounds like it was totally forced on them most of the time. Do you feel that was right across the board in Ireland? Was that society, or was it more prevalent in these areas?

It was across the board. Women were controlled by the— mostly by the church. The government set the rules, but the church were the ones who controlled it because everybody went to mass every Sunday. If you didn't go to mass, it was a mortal sin. So everyone went to mass, and the priests would be up preaching about how sinful we were. They would go home and live their double lives. This was what I didn't find out either for a long time, that they would— every priest takes a vow of celibacy when he's ordained. Not every priest now. There were some very good priests, but a lot of them went straight out to find a woman or a man or a child. We all know what's happened all over the world. That's come out everywhere. Ireland, England, Australia, America, everywhere about the abuse of children. Sexual abuse was rampant in the Catholic Church.

Not everywhere.

Not every priest. A lot of them, there were a lot of good priests. There were also a lot of others. I didn't really discover that until I was an adult. But now it's, everybody knows now because of, it has been exposed all over the world. And that was part of the reason Ireland managed to break away from the rules of the Catholic Church. The indoctrination of children started at the age of 6, First Holy Communion. So we were indoctrinated about mortal sin and how we would reach the use of reason when we were 7, and then we were capable of committing mortal sin. So you see, we grew up terrified.

It's shocking. It's shocking how they controlled your minds, and yet they controlled you, but they didn't control themselves.

Yes, yes. And they talk about the honor to be poor. None of them lived in poverty. The Archbishop had a palace. The priests had beautiful houses. They all had housekeepers. They weren't living the way they were preaching.

Yes.

Thought something has to be done to help the women. 10 people living in one small room, with a sink and cold running water, a lavatory, and a small little stove for heating and cooking. If the men got work, then there would be some money to buy food. If they didn't get work, then there was no money. A lot of the women— now, one of the women I delivered of her 9th baby.

God, 9!

But it was her 22nd pregnancy. One, and there were others. They were permanently pregnant. This was the plan of the church. A woman's place was in the home. Girls were not to be taught physics, chemistry or biology. Girls were to be taught cooking and cleaning and laundry and tied to the kitchen sink. There is still part of a law in the Constitution of Ireland which says a woman's place is in the home, something to that effect.

It's just shocking.

Yes, appalling.

So tell me, Brigid, in your experience, what did these repeated or unplanned pregnancies do to women emotionally over time?

The women had no life. They were wrecked. And occasionally a woman would say, And if a woman said to me, when after we delivered the woman, we would visit her for 10 days. And that is the time that conversations would take place. If a woman said to me, is there nothing I can do about this? Can you help me at all? I would sit down with that woman. I sat down with the women quite a bit. And I drank tea with the women in their homes. They would have 2 special cups for the nurses, and they would make tea. And I would sit down and I would talk to them. But when I realized the problem we had, I tried to find out what the problem was. And what was the problem? could be done about it. Then I began to discover what the Catholic Church was really all about. And it was about the control of— if you control the women, you control the children.

Ooh.

And that's what they went after. The Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, where I trained as a midwife— there are other maternity hospitals, but this is the one that I trained in— that was built by the British, and it was controlled by the British. And it was one place the Catholic Church never got control of. There were no Catholic Doctors or administrators, or— and the master, who is the overall head of the hospital, was always a non-Catholic. Even the matron was a non-Catholic. When the pill came on the market in the early '60s, the Rotunda Hospital set up a family planning clinic. Now, these places were all totally condemned by the Catholic Church, but they could not control this. It was one place we didn't go to work. We weren't— we didn't go to work there. We weren't sent there. We were taught how to refer the women. The woman would go back for her postnatal checkup, and then she would ask to be referred to the family planning clinic, and she would get the pill, and they would give her 2 months' supply at a time. It was dispensed in the hospital, so she didn't have to go to any outside pharmacist who could report her to the priest or any of this garbage. Once that all happened, people like me who referred women and urged them to go were living in sin.

Ooh.

And so I lived my 3 years on the district in sin because I referred as many women as I could. But it took a fair bit of explaining. Well, what would the other women say when I'm now not pregnant? They would know something was going on. In the end, there was a considerable number of them who were prepared to go and not worry about what other people say about them. So that was the only way I could get around.

I find that just phenomenal that they're worried that someone would look at them and think that they're not pregnant, that something suspicious could be happening.

Yeah.

That is just— it's unimaginable now. It's just that, you know, Now you worry that someone's pregnant all the time. You know, it's the complete opposite. As a young midwife working in the hospital, so did you help the deliveries in hospitals as well?

Yes, we had to have 17 deliveries in the hospital and 3 on the district. We had to have a total of 20, a minimum of 3 on the district and whatever else in the hospital. And sometimes we had more than 20. Yes, we were taught very well how to deliver.

We were taught Was there ever, when you were working in the hospital, from what you were saying, the church tried to control everything even though the heads were not Catholic. But was there ever a time when you were doing your job and you just felt torn between doing what they expected you to do and doing what you felt was right?

I didn't worry too much about it. That was really more the district. The hospital, the women usually came in in established labour. The induction of labour didn't really happen often then. There were certain women that would come in complications that were kept in hospital. And mostly they were delivered by caesarean section when their time came. There were, there was an antenatal ward, but it was for women with very serious complaints, seriously high blood pressure or bleeding in pregnancy, because there was no ultrasound back then.

Yes.

And so when ultrasound came, that changed the whole scene, because then problems could be diagnosed, or the woman could be cleared. No, there's no big problem, kept for a couple of days and then go home. But that didn't happen in the '70s because we didn't have, um, we didn't have ultrasounds.

It just sounds so traumatic for women back then, and it definitely sounds like, uh, consent to be pregnant was just assumed rather than asked of women. Knowing that, is that what was the impetus to that quiet sort of growing, um, protest that started happening where women started quietly resisting?

Yes, there were 6 women who met in secret every Monday. Now, I didn't know anything about these women. I was, in the end, so frustrated with not being able to make any improvements in Dublin, I came to Australia. So nobody knew about these 6 women who met every Monday at a restaurant, and their plan was to stand up to the Catholic Church and the Irish government. And so they came out one day and announced that they were going to Belfast, and they urged people to come with them, and 300 ended up going. So they were told to meet at Connolly's railway station for the 8 o'clock express to Belfast. They were all there. Some men went as well. And they had posters which they stuck on the windows of the train called the Contraceptive Train. So only 5 of the women went, and they went off for the day. They did what they went to do. They went to buy contraception. There were complications, of course, about that, but they bought what they went to get. And one woman stayed at home, and she was a journalist. Her job was to rouse the papers and rouse the and get them all to the railway station to meet the train coming in at 6 o'clock in the evening. And she was out in the street bringing the people in from the street. So Connolly Railway Station was crowded when the train arrived at 6 o'clock. And the women were told on the train by the leaders, they were to declare everything they bought on the customs form, and they were to declare it openly to the customs officers, but not part with any of it. Don't hand over any of it. So when 300 people hit the station, the customs officers couldn't control any of it. There was police as well, but not a big force of police. And so the women were, were in the end allowed through. But, but this woman who was revving up the crowd, she got them to shout, let them through, let them through. And in the end, the women got through. Now, I read about that in the Melbourne papers in Australia. I didn't know anything about it. And none of my family, my mother, my 2 sisters, or friends ever mentioned that to me ever. None of them ever. You know, whether they were afraid or what, I don't know. Those women then called a meeting a couple of weeks later, and they were hoping that they could fill one room in the Mansion House, which had been— which they could book for a meeting. But not only did they fill the whole of the Mansion House, they filled the whole of the court, the forecourt. The Mansion House was the Lord Mayor's home, and the whole street was blocked. Thousands of women turned up to the meeting. So they told the women to go home and set up a little group in your own area and work out how you are going to overcome this. In the end, contraception was legalised in the '80s, in the mid-'80s, but not because the government had a change of heart or the church had a road to Damascus experience. It was because of the outbreak of AIDS. Ireland was then part of Europe. So I would imagine, although I'm not certain, that there would have been pressure from Europe. Yes.

Given that the clergy, a huge number of them were homosexual.

Well, anyway, they would have been pushy.

Yes, it just sounds like it just took a whole kind of revolution. I'm kind of interested also, before the AIDS, what was the home life like for these women who went and rebelled, went on this contraceptive train? I'm so fascinated to know, you know, like, where did they pick up that courage and what was it like for them when they returned home? Because it wouldn't have been accepted by the husbands.

Actually, it was more accepted by the husbands.

Oh.

Yes, because they were affected as well, you see. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Billings method of contraception. The Billings method of contraception is where you have to work out ovulation and then avoid ovulation, the time of ovulation. I mean, there's something like, there's something like 12 days of the month that are not available to women to have sex. How do I say this? The women 2 of them were, for a start, the 6 women, 2 were doctors, 2 were journalists.

So they were educated.

But even they couldn't get, look, unless you went out of the Republic of Ireland, you could not get access to contraception. It wasn't available in the Republic. The other 2 women, one came from the slums in the south of the western side of Dublin, the Liberties, and the other woman had already been in jail. She'd served a term in jail for her activism. So that was the 6 women. They were determined something was going to happen. And because now there was thousands of women, and they never go near the church at all. So that was all lost too.

You can sort of— I can imagine that when you say, well, the men were into it, well, then that's when I thought, well, of course they would, because another pregnancy means another mouth to feed, and it's just more pressure.

Yes. And women, there was just no choice. The other thing was that married women were forbidden from working outside of the home, and that was a law. That was the law. They were forbidden.

It's so archaic, even for those days.

Yes.

But it was okay to be a midwife?

Yes. Well, they had to have— see, all the midwives were women. There was no male midwives back then. The doctors were men, but the midwives were all women.

It's just— I mean, the courage of those women to be able to do that. Like, you talk about a character called Brianna and how defiant she is, but she's also very afraid. How much of that tension reflects in your own experience going through that time?

I wanted to go to England to train to be a midwife, and my mother was determined I would not go. Go to England. And I have 3 sisters, 2 sisters, there's 3 of us, and I'm the third. Well, my middle sister was a problem. She couldn't get my mother's ear because the older girl had it, and she would take out her revenge on me. And so then when she got the opportunity to help my mother against me, she would do that. So she said to my mother, if she goes to England, she'll lose her religion. And my mother clung onto that. This was all just made-up nonsense, but it was used. It was used as an excuse to stop because Because women were terrified their daughters would get pregnant. They were terrified. Because if they did, daughters were sent, were put out of the house if they got pregnant, and they were sent to a place called the Magdalena Laundries. Have you heard of the laundries?

No.

Well, that's another, another issue. So they would be just abandoned by the family, and they would go into these shocking places where they would work in these convents. And the laundry came in from hotels and from the priests and all of that, and then they would be washing and ironing that all week. And then the worst part was, after the baby was born, baby would have to be handed over and went into orphanages.

Oh, that's just awful.

Years later, a woman down in the west of Ireland wondered what had happened. The convent had closed, and she'd wondered what had happened to all these babies. And because she couldn't work herself, because she was married, she went to investigate. And as a result of that, about 800 babies were found in a septic tank down the back of the yard.

That is just horrendous.

Now, there were similar situations all over Ireland, in Cork in particular, in Dublin, and that woman was in the west of Ireland in Galway. Babies were found buried all over the place.

Oh, that's just shocking. So what— I don't know if you know this statistic, but what would the suicide rate for young women who have gone through hardship, hard labor, and also having their child taken from them would be back in those days.

I have no idea. We never ever heard of suicide because we knew if you committed suicide, well, that was it. You were going to hell for all eternity. No escape from the burning fires of hell. We were frightened. We were frightened.

So they just endured all of this pain. Bridget, back then, you know, it was very obvious that control was visible. It was so obvious it was out there, you know, between law, religion, societal restrictions. Where do you see these same patterns showing up for women today?

America.

Oh, that's interesting you say that.

Well, the family planning clinics are being closed down. Abortion is illegal. The problems began after those women in Dublin, but at that same time, people, younger people were getting more educated. And they were going to university and going to college. And because those institutions are in the city, they would move out of home and come to the city. And so the young people would go into apartments together, live together, and they very quickly discovered they had no freedoms. I mean, when young people live together, well, we all know what happens. And they had no freedoms. And so they left Ireland in their thousands. Now, the Irish government said they were leaving Ireland because there was no work. But Anna Enright, the Irish author, she said, and she was one of them, She said that there was plenty of work, but they weren't prepared to work in Ireland unless the government changed the rules. And the rules then got changed because of AIDS, not because of the government or the church. And the younger people have managed to get a law on divorce, which didn't exist. Now they can get divorced in Ireland. I didn't know that for a long time. That somehow escaped me.

Yes.

And there is an abortion law with restrictions, which are reasonable. The early-term abortions I never was involved in at all. That wasn't my work. That's gynae work, which is more a general subject. But I was involved with the second trimester, because abortion is legal if in— after 13 weeks. It's legal if the woman's health is seriously affected. Now, that was brought into the law after a woman died because they wouldn't intervene. A woman died, and there was uproar. That law got changed. So if the woman's health— and you see, women get pregnant with serious medical complications, and they know they shouldn't. But where would they— what were they to do? What were they to do? They're married, they can't work, all these rules. And there were more and more rules being put in place. The other reason is because they now have ultrasound. And when that— the woman has that 18 to 20 week scan, that is where they pick up a lot of the abnormalities that are not compatible with life. So those parents are sent for genetic counseling, and no move will be made at all until they've had genetic counseling. And they're sent home from there to think about it, talk about it, and make a decision.

Yes.

And then if those— that couple decide that they would terminate the pregnancy, then that will go ahead. Now, back then, induction of pregnancy was— induction of labor was very difficult, and a woman could be 4 or 5 days in the birth center. If they came from the country, because these procedures weren't performed in the country, they were done in the big hospital. So if they came from the country, they may not have told anybody. So their plan would be to have the pregnancy terminated and then go home and say they'd lost the baby. So the man was then left for all these days, and he would be lying on a stretcher bed, you know, staff trying to help patients. And this is in Australia as well, here in Melbourne. Around that time in the '70s was the introduction of medical termination, and medical termination I don't know exactly where it began, but France was running a trial. And so I wanted to include that in the book. And I wanted women to understand what women went through before this time.

Yes.

The importance of medical termination as opposed to surgical, because the early pregnancies, they went into hospital, had a general anaesthetic, and had an operation. It was always different for the later pregnancies, because the pregnancy is more complicated. And So in order to tell, when we're writing, we're taught to show, not tell. So to show the medical termination, I had to have someone who was pregnant. So the protagonist was the obvious one to have a pregnancy. So how was she going to get pregnant? And that's in the book. You've read that. That was the way to show how this was happening. And also to show women what is involved in it. It's not just like women, women for a while, they were seeming to use termination as a means of contraception. But it's not as simple as they might believe.

Yes.

And then from that medical termination, which is what was described in the book, about 10 years later, they had progressed to where they now have mifepristone, or RU-486, and they're the abortion pill. And that changed the procedure for the women who were more than 20 weeks pregnant and who needed to be delivered more quickly. So that's, that was the purpose of putting that into the book to show women where, where change, where life changed.

In your opinion, as a midwife who's seen so much over the years and has an understanding of what's happening in countries now, what do you think about women and their ability to have agency over their own body and their own choices? And are their choices truly their own, or are they influenced? How do you think we've progressed?

Well, we've definitely progressed because women have choices now. They have choices, um, of contraception. And a doctor will give contraception to a child, I think, over 12.

Wow.

And they go into the chemist and it's— there's no questions asked. And this government are now in the process of educating pharmacists so the woman can go into the chemist without having to go to the doctor. Now, that's not coming for another year or two, but that will come where you don't have to go to a doctor. The woman has to go to the doctor the first time, and she probably should go to the doctor however often he tells her she needs to. to go because women need to be— other areas need to be checked as well, as we all know. And but in the meantime, she's able to go into the chemist and the chemist will have had an interview with her and she'll get her contraception from the chemist. So that's working well, I think, for most people. Some people say they can't tolerate the pill. There's different reasons. Often that's because they really don't want to take it. But there are women's clinics now, and there'll be some in Sydney, the Women's Hospital in Melbourne, Dublin Monash Hospital have a lovely women's centre where you go and you're looked after by women doctors, women nurses, and they're all staffed by women. So there's plenty of places for women to go to and to discuss their problems. Once I started to train as a midwife in Dublin, I had a never-ending queue of women, some of which I didn't even know. Oh, I'm such a buddy's sister's friend, and they would want information And I never brought them into my home. My mother was very curious about these people. Such a bloody sister came here today. What was she looking for? I said, why didn't you ask her?

You can imagine back then.

I would ring them up and say, where can we meet? And we will go to a cafe or a restaurant or somewhere. Yes, I didn't go to my home and I didn't go to their home. Most of them only needed an explanation of their menstrual cycle and they would manage that. And they managed, some women managed it. But as, as women became more free. And now sex seems to be part of a date, never mind a relationship. They know all those things. And then they wouldn't be prepared to go along with something like the Billings method.

Exactly.

But even out here, not that many years ago, 2 or 3, a woman knocked on my door. And I thought I recognized her. She said, you might not remember me, but we were in a playgroup together. Now, my children were in secondary school or late primary school, the oldest one was, and the younger one was in primary school. And she said, And I remember women used to come to you in the playgroup and ask you, ask advice. And she wanted me, and I did go the next— I wanted her to come in, she wouldn't. She said, no, come and have lunch with me tomorrow. So she could discuss a problem about her child. So that like even then, and now, now if women want advice now, it's usually about different problems, middle-aged problems. And I don't diagnose people because I'm not a doctor.

Yes.

But I can usually tell women where to go to get the advice they're looking for.

Yes.

But it all starts with the GP.

Absolutely. It's such a fascinating story, Brigid. It really is. And it needs— I think it needs to be heard by more and more people, what women have actually gone through over time, and how certain countries, like you said, where contraceptive pill is still illegal or abortion is illegal and having agency over your own body seems to be something still foreign to some people that women would want that. Why does this story still matter Now, in these days, women's rights were very hard won, very hard won and fought against.

And then younger women coming along, oh, I'm not a feminist. That's fine. You don't have to be a feminist. But you need to understand, you didn't wake up, your mother, your grandmother didn't wake up to the conditions you're waking up to. Those, those back to the suffragettes, women's rights were hard won. And they're very easily lost.

Yes.

And unless every woman does one thing in her life to try and help, women, those rights will be lost. And they're already— I mean, you get, you get a situation where the leadership changes, and straight away, the first thing we want to do is take away women's rights.

Yes.

In one of the biggest, richest countries on earth. I just think women just need to be mindful what they've got has come from the hard work of other people.

That's so true. And it's so important. And that's why I think your book matters so much, especially when you see Women going against women, women voting for no abortion, women voting that women don't have this agency over their own body. They don't have choice, especially when they found themselves in very difficult situations in a non-consent pregnancy due to maybe violence or whatever. It's just astounding when women stand up against other women, and your book reminds us of what it was really. What's it really like to live with no choice?

Yes, the bit about the protagonist working in the private clinic, a version of that clinic existed. And the midwives, the woman who owned that clinic, she was a midwife, a registered midwife. She said, well, when the Catholic Church and the Irish government give us our rights, we won't have a need for this.

That's right. And every woman deserves the right. That's, I think that's the main thread of your story here, your book, is that we have the right to choose. It's a fantastic story. I hope everybody goes to the show notes, and I know that you're— you can buy the book on your website. It's a fascinating read. It's an important read for women historically and how it relates to modern day. Thank you for coming on.

Thank you for inviting me, Rita. It was lovely to meet you.

Lovely meeting you.