I gave birth to my child on a metal table at 18, alone in a room in a convent'

DEIRDRE WADDING WAS 18-years-old when she entered the Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork. It was 1981, and though Wadding said she was not a victim of “cruelty or physical abuse”, she, like the other girls at the home, suffered emotional and psychological abuse that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. “I shared a room with a girl who was only 13-years-old, she was a child. I was 18, she sobbed her heart out for her mother every night and I mean it was incredibly, incredibly traumatic,” she said.

https://www.thejournal.ie/bessborough-mother-and-baby-home-3273435-Mar2017/