Director, Julia Samuels and actor, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell dashed to Belfast in Northern Ireland last Thursday to address an international conference on abortion at Ulster University.

The next 20 Stories High touring production I Told My Mum I Was Going On An R.E Trip is based on interviews with young women talking about unintended pregnancies and their decisions to have abortions or not.

Julia was invited to talk about the process of creating the play to conference delegates who included doctors, social workers, psychologists, policy makers, lawyers and lecturers.

Julia explained;

“This play started as a discussion with our youth theatre who were passionate about the subject, across a broad spectrum of opinion. Two days later, two young people approached me with their experiences of unintended pregnancies. One talked about how she’d been feeling so bad and guilty, and now, just talking about it, she felt less bad: she was no longer burdened by the secret.”

Julia ran a series of workshops with young people and conducted over 50 interviews with young people who had abortions and those who decided to continue with their pregnancies, doctors and healthcare professionals, ethicists, sexual health practitioners, Pro-Choice campaigners and those who describe themselves as ‘Pro-Life’. It is these interviews that will be edited and presented by actors in the final ‘verbatim’ production.

As Julia added; “The telling of the abortion story in the women’s words seemed to be so absent, so unheard, that verbatim felt like a brilliant form to use.”

Northern Irish actress Jamie-Lee O’Donnell presented some of the verbatim testimony as part of Julia’s presentation.

In Northern Ireland where the conference took place abortion is illegal unless the life of the mother is at risk – find out why here.