Mothers suffered abuse in a hospital driven by religion – not science

IN the litany of maternity care scandals at the Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, one stands out: symphysiotomy.

Gerard Connolly, the hospital’s ‘foundation’ obstetrician, was a self-confessed “addict” of symphysiotomy: “If we cannot deliver with the vacuum extractor and drip we divide the symphysis,” he told the Royal Academy of Medicine in 1966. His addiction went unchallenged. Mothers had to wait for Connolly to die before the practice ceased. More than 400 pelvises were severed there, some at 34 weeks of pregnancy, others in the aftermath of a Caesarean section. These operations were high-risk: babies occasionally died and many mothers were left permanently disabled, incontinent and in pain.

Symphysiotomy was driven not by science, but by faith. Caesarean section (the norm for difficult births) was associated with “the improper prevention of pregnancy”, as Arthur Barry put it. Women were also used at the Lourdes as teaching aides for medical students bound for the tropics and even, apparently, as “lab rats” to test the outer limits of the surgery, presumably for application in medical centres owned by the Medical Missionaries of Mary overseas.

Asked to investigate all of the obstetric and gynaecological injuries inflicted on women at the Lourdes since 1974, the then Minister for Health, Micheál Martin, refused.

His successor, Mary Harney, has four times declined to hold an independent inquiry into symphysiotomy. Last February, she asked the very body whose members carried out these operations, the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (IOG), to “report” on the practice. The IOG has been crafting its defence since 2001. Recently, its former chairman, Conor Carr, argued that symphysiotomy was a life-saver in a Third World country (Ireland) where rickets were widespread, pelvises defective and contraception non-existent.

Doctors who inflicted serious and permanent injury to women from 1944-’84 by severing their pelvises were therefore saving them from the risk of dying (from repeat Caesarean sections).

If this myth-making forms the basis of the IOG’s upcoming report to the minister, as seems likely, then justice will be denied to well in excess of 100 mothers, many of them Lourdes’ casualties; and, in a spirit of collegial, if collusive, loyalty to the perpetrators, another rotten page in the history of institutional abuse in Ireland will be turned.

Marie O’Connor

PRO

Survivors of Symphysiotomy (SOS)

Rathdown Road

Dublin 7