Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

When I first read this report in The Irish Times, which was the first one to flag to the people that the tone of the report was very much to say there had been no whitewash, nothing was going on, people should move on, there was no problem and there was too much panic about something that was not really a problem, I immediately felt sick in my stomach. It reminded me greatly of the litany of offences that the women who suffered from the anti-D serum in the hepatitis C scandal went through for years at the hands of the State under the current Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan.

We listened to the evidence of women who suffered from symphysiotomy although we could not hear the evidence of the many such women who are dead. Some of those who gave evidence to us at the time when the scandal was breaking have since died. I pay tribute to those women and their families who fought for truth and justice in this case and who, I am afraid, will have to continue to fight for truth and justice. The truth is not out and justice has not even been attempted in the Harding Clark report. It is a whitewash. It is utterly disgraceful and totally prejudiced against those women who suffered the violation of their bodies in this manner. I thank the academic Máiréad Enright, who has done brilliant work in highlighting how flawed the report is.

Of the 275 pages of the report, 133 are commentary from the judge while 142 are extracts from medical literature. She assessed applications from 600 women who believed they had been subjected to symphysiotomy, she oversaw searches of hospital records and medical texts and she allocated payments according to what she believed was just. The judge allocated €50,000 in some cases, or €100,000, to those whom she believed could link symphysiotomy to ongoing, lifelong health consequences. However, Máiréad Enright points out to us that the extensive defence of what is a uniquely Irish practice of non-emergency dealing with women in pregnancy is not an independent report and that survivors are entitled to more under international law. I entirely agree with her.

What is independent about a report that spends more than a whole chapter criticising and condemning women who mistakenly claimed they had had a symphysiotomy and spends less time examining why doctors carried out the practice? I argue the reasons for which they carried out the practice were rooted in the conservative, Roman Catholic nature of Irish society and not just the church itself but how it is linked to the operation of everything that happens with the State, crucially in the health service. Therefore, we find a very heavy concentration of the use of the procedure in somewhere like Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, which was dominated by a Roman Catholic ethos, as Deputy Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin pointed out. It is clearly linked to the role the State plays in dealing with women. Deputy Ruth Coppinger has gone through how the State has dealt with women on many issues, from abortion to contraception.

In the 1970s and beyond, when the operations were being carried out, doctors probably thought, with their Catholic heads on, and with discussion with hospital management, that if a woman was in trouble during her pregnancy it was better to break her hip bone so she could easily have more children than to put her through a caesarean section, which would make it more difficult for her to have children. They probably thought what they wanted out of the country was for women to have more and more children, that childbirth was fundamental to what a woman was in Catholic Ireland in the 1970s. Symphysiotomy guaranteed that women could have more children, and that the process of reproduction, of women's bodies being used to reproduce more human beings, would not be interfered with.

This goes to the heart of what Máiréad Enright points out and which was ignored entirely by the report. The report, by its very nature, is flawed, given that it fails to deal with the direct consequence of the linkage between church and State, particularly in the health service and on the question of women's reproductive rights. We will not interview a doctor who will admit he or she thought a woman should have lots more babies and broke her hip bone to guarantee it would happen. However, this attitude would have been enshrined in the ethos of the hospitals and the management of maternity services at the time. One of the reasons it was enshrined in it was linked to the fact that women did not have access to contraception.

The judge referred to women who went on to say that although they suffered pain during sexual intercourse for up to a year afterwards, it did not stop them from having more babies. Hello. All it says is that they had sexual intercourse without contraception, during which they suffered pain, because at that time it was understood that it was their role in life to have more babies regardless. The fact that they had no access to contraception or abortion is crucially linked to how they were treated. There are many misinterpretations and opportunities in dealing with it.

We need a new report and a new study as well as a new attitude to the countless women who suffered physical and emotional pain. They also suffered, as was stated in many of the testimonies, from distress and powerlessness. Imagine one's body is being used for experimentation in a medical practice to ensure future generations will be procreated. C-section or surgery were not to be used. Instead, a procedure was used to ensure women could have more babies. This is what is at the heart of this and what has been missed. To add insult to injury, the judge said one person's case is worth €50,000, another’s, €10,000 but she hardly believes others suffered. The judge should be coming out with a report that utterly condemns the system of symphysiotomy, the hospitals that oversaw it, as well as the health service which continues to whitewash it and do these women down. Hats off to those women for fighting. It must be very difficult to do.

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