Helping symphysiotomy victims

Anxiety is clearly mounting following the recent award of €450,000 to a survivor of symphysiotomy.

However, to imply, as corporate lawyers have done, that casualties of the surgery should now be denied access to the courts on the ground of undue delay in bringing a claim is outrageous.

Healthy young women, many expecting their first child, were often invalided for life, unknowingly, in these covert operations.

Their innocence was abused, their trust violated, their rights denied. Patient consent was not sought. This involuntary surgery was often done under general anaesthetic, sometimes at 34 weeks of pregnancy. Mengele comes to mind.

Silence surrounded the unhinging of the pelvis. Hospital midwives nursed women as though they had not had surgery, forcing them to walk on their broken bones: a wider passage had to be made for nine or ten babies to be able to come through, even if the mother never made a full recovery.

Almost every woman was discharged from hospital, without advice, without painkillers, not knowing that her pelvis had been severed.

Unable to walk and in agony, women went to their GPs, who mostly turned a blind eye.

Hardly any doctor, then or since, was prepared to acknowledge the operation’s often catastrophic consequences: lifelong disability, chronic pain, incontinence, trauma and even sterility. Women who complained of chronic pain were labelled ‘psychiatric’. Most only discovered that their symphysis had been cut or their pubic bone sawn 40 or even 50 years later, through the media.

And still the belief that it had to be done to save the life of their child persisted.

The realisation that the surgery was gratuituous, that it was performed side by side with Caesarean section, not for medical necessity but to facilitate unlimited childbearing, came slowly. Doctors averse to birth control disliked Caesarean on account of its association with contraception and sterilisation. Four such operations was widely seen as the upper safety limit. Women were also used as ‘clinical material’, for experimental purposes and staff training. If corporate law seeks to maintain its embrace of medicine and religion, it had better find a less abusive scenario.

Survivors’ access to justice should not be compromised.

The Oireachtas should now set aside the statute of limitations for 12 months, to allow them to take their chances in the courts, as was done for other survivors of institutional. Justice demands no less.

Marie O’Connor

chairperson

Survivors of Symphysiotomy

Dublin 7