Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Harding Clark report is another injustice to the women who had symphysiotomies against their will. The report is unbalanced, flawed and not objective. It should not be accepted and promoted by the Government. The report was released before Christmas but we are only discussing it at the end of January because a number of Deputies intervened and demanded that it be discussed in the Dáil. In the meantime, some in the Catholic right, the media and the medical establishment have seized on the report and used it as an opportunity to cleanse what happened in the past and to pretend it was not so bad. The message being conveyed in the last month or so is that the women concerned were not believed then and will not be believed now. That is shocking and outrageous.

Judge Harding Clark's report came up with the concept of alternative facts before Donald Trump even thought about it. The Government, Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party should think very seriously before giving this report their imprimatur. The Irish State has an appalling record in dealing with women's health, women's bodies and women's lives. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party have all participated in Governments which took decisions to relegate women's health in general, to sub-contract women's bodies to the church and its institutions and to challenge in the courts women who were making claims against the State for abuse and injury. Before they consider signing off on this report, they should recall the other chapters in a very bad saga. Those chapters include the Magdalen laundries and the mother and baby prisons - we should stop calling them homes because that gives them a cosy sounding name. There is the export of the abortion trail, where women with crisis pregnancies are shunned out of the country. The death of Savita Halappanavar is another chapter. Of course, let us not forget the glorious plot, with denial and fighting to the very end, against the anti-D women who were poisoned by a State institution. Key figures in this Government and Dáil who played a role in that shameful episode 20 years ago are potentially playing a role now in respect of symphysiotomy.

Let us be clear and frank about what is happening here. A process was commissioned by the Dáil that was supposed to be restorative for women damaged by medical professionals, church and State. Instead, a flawed report is being seized on by the same establishment and ardent Catholic commentators to give the impression that it was not that bad, that was how things were then and a woman's lot was hard everywhere. However, let nobody fool themselves. Ireland was not a normal European country then with its maternity practices, and nobody should fool themselves that it is a normal European country now with the eighth amendment and the continuation of utterly condescending patriarchal maternity practices. I can give two quick examples. The heads of the hospitals that look after women giving birth are still called "masters". Some of them are archbishops, such as the chairman of the board of the National Maternity Hospital as a result of an Act that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party have not bothered to repeal in 80 years.

Instead of restorative justice to damaged women, is what we are seeing in this case an attempt by the Government to spin this story out until the last of the aging symphysiotomy women die? Frankly, that is how it appears. There is disdain in this report on the part of the judge towards the women.

She used language such as that they were "amenable to ... emotional contagion", subject to "acquired group memory" and "self convincing confabulation of personal history". The women were subjected to symphysiotomy because of patronising and patriarchal views of women. They did not give consent and were not informed about what was happening to them. It would seem they are being condescended to again in the 21st century by the judge. The tone of the report suggests the women were ignorant and it is claimed at one point that they were under the influence of campaigners, rather than that the women were well aware of what happened to them and the trauma it created afterwards, especially during subsequent pregnancies. At one point, Judge Harding Clark used the defence that the women were Roman Catholic themselves. It is incredible. Does the fact that 95% of the population is born Roman Catholic mean they should not be asked for consent to have their pelvic bones broken?

Symphysiotomy was a human rights violation. It disregarded the women's rights to bodily autonomy. Whether the doctors intended to harm people is irrelevant. The point is that they did. The tone of the report is what we see again and again in this country when it comes to women's health, namely, the idea of an acceptable standard of suffering. Harding Clark is obsessed with whether it can be proven with "near certainty" - a standard that is not even applied in personal injury law - that the woman endured lifelong suffering, not just any suffering, it has to be lifelong. As it was, 35% had to prove they suffered significant disabilities which lasted more than three years. A similar threshold of suffering was applied in the case of Savita Halappanavar, when doctors literally stood over her to measure whether her life, not just her health, was at risk. The issue is that the women did not consent to the procedure and were not informed of it. There are many flaws in the report, which I do not have time to deal with. They have been taken up by people such as Marie O'Connor, Máiréad Enright, Professor Linda Connolly and Dr. Jacqueline Morrissey.

The Minister for Health, Deputy Simon Harris, mentioned the 185 so-called false claims. He repeated that 185 people were unable to establish their claims. Midwives for Choice went through these cases and outlined the facts. Could the Minister please correct this? A total of 65 people withdrew their claims. We do not know why; there could be any number of reasons. Eight people engaged in the process initially but did not engage any further; 21 had inaccurate medical records; 12 were late applications given that the women were given only 20 days in which to make an application; and one person died. This means 78 people did not establish a claim, not 185. The Government is using the figure of 185 inaccurately.

The 78 women are not liars. The process had no oral testimonies. It was centred on written medical records and the judge even claimed that there was no evidence of a religious rather than obstetric reason for the claims. Again, I do not have time to go into it. However, I validate the work done by Survivors of Symphysiotomy Ireland and I hope they will fully answer this outrageous report, which tries to demean them and the women involved.

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