Newborn will face ‘enormous challenges’
The Master of the Rotunda, Sam Coulter- Smith, warned that the baby will face “enormous challenges” as it was born 15 to 16 weeks early.
Dr Coulter-Smith said the baby will spend up to 16 weeks in neo-natal intensive care at a cost of between €60,000 and €90,000 to the health service.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio, he said there was an “80 to 90% likelihood that the baby will survive, but a 20 to 30% likelihood that it will survive” without long-term health problems. “You not only have the cost of care, you have long-term issues; anything from mild learning disabilities to physical issues, to cerebral palsy to long-term respiratory morbidity as well,” he said.
He warned that “at these borders of viability” there will be “enormous problems” with a newborn.
Both the child and the woman at the centre of the case are continuing to receive care from the State. It is expected that the child will be taken into the care of the HSE.
It is understood the child’s mother, who herself was under the age of 18, had expressed her wish to have an abortion during her first trimester, but was at 21 to 22 weeks’ gestation before the HSE was informed. The mother was not born in Ireland.
It is reported that she found out that she was pregnant at a medical assessment a week or two after she arrived in Ireland.
She immediately had told authorities that she did not want to keep the baby but nobody gave her information on abortion. Eventually, she decided to attend a GP and it was then that the HSE became aware of her wish to abort.
A independent panel of two psychiatrists and an obstetrician considered her case, as laid out under the new abortion legislation, and refused the termination.
The psychiatrists had agreed she was suicidal but the obstetrician said that the foetus was viable.
She then went on hunger and thirst strike before the HSE made an ex parte application to the High Court to stop her starving herself.
The mother then agreed to have her baby delivered at 24 to 26 weeks gestation by Caesarean section.
