We must close another horrific chapter of abuse

THE Ryan Report revealed sexual and physical abuse on a monstrous scale in Ireland in the labour camps that were the industrial and reform schools. Since its publication, we have come to realise that, without acknowledgement there can be no healing, without redress, no closure.

These valuable lessons now need to be applied to two other areas. Recent revelations of sexual abuse at the Lourdes have rightly prompted renewed calls for an independent inquiry into the actions of a surgeon accused of sexual abuse at the Lourdes Hospital over several decades.

But those same decades were also decades of medical abuse in that hospital and others. From 1944-83, around 500 mothers had their pelvises sundered by obstetricians seeking to control women’s reproductive behaviour through surgery. At a time when Caesarean section was the surgery of choice for obstructed labour, these women were subjected to an archaic operation that left them unable to walk, and condemned them to a lifetime of chronic pain and disability, and, in some cases, incontinence. Children born by symphysiotomy were often injured. Some face a lifetime of medical intervention in consequence. Like physical and sexual abuse, symphysiotomy left psychological as well as physical scars. It blighted sexual lives and occasionally ended marriages. The severing of women’s pelvises in childbirth for doctrinal rather than medical reasons must rank as one of the biggest health scandals in the history of the State, second only to the contamination of the human blood supply.