‘Brutality from beginning to end’
Rita McCann — a sprightly 86-year-old mother of five from Monaghan — recalls how her body was “sawed” by doctors when she attended the National Maternity Hospital in Holles St, Dublin, in 1957 for the birth of her first child. “‘Brutality’ is the word to use from beginning to end,” Rita says.
She had spent a week in hospital, including 30 hours in the labour ward, before an operation now widely regarded as a medieval-style practice was performed on her using a local anaesthetic shortly after midnight.
Rita admits that “symphysiotomy” was an unknown word to her at the time and until 2002, when she only really became aware that other women had suffered a similar fate.
She remains “very angry” that no doctor ever explained to her down through the years why they had to use an alternative procedure to a caesarian section. “Nobody consulted me or asked for my permission” Rita says. “I was taken in and abused, basically.”
She claims the remarks of one medic summed up the profession’s attitude to any complaints about the decision to perform a symphysiotomy.
Rita says one doctor had commented that she would forget all about the operation once she had a healthy baby the following day.
“Fifty years later and I haven’t forgotten,” Rita said yesterday, recounting her harrowing experience at a press conference organised by the support group Survivors of Symphysiotomy.
Even after giving birth, she didn’t get to see her baby for another 48 hours. It was around this time that she finally went, in her own words, “into hysterics”.
She suffered further with a B.coli infection, which left her confined to a bed for another fortnight, even though she was still unable to walk when she was eventually allowed to go home.
More than half a century later, Rita still suffers pain as a result of the operation. “If the lynchpin of your body is broken, everything else falls apart,” she says.
Rita says she finds it difficult to understand why the Government and doctors can’t face the fact that many women were left “with a life sentence” and why they can’t finally deliver justice for women who suffered “this disgraceful procedure”.
While she would like some financial compensation, her primary concern is for the State authorities to acknowledge that symphysiotomies were “simply wrong”.
