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Tomorrow morning, the European Court of Human Rights will deliver an important ruling on a dark chapter of how the Irish healthcare system abused women throughout the 20th century.
A quick thread on what’s happening and why it matters, as it has gone under the radar imo:
A quick thread on what’s happening and why it matters, as it has gone under the radar imo:
A warning that some of the following tweets contain graphic descriptions of medical procedures, which are quite harrowing and may be upsetting
It’s about a medical procedure called symphysiotomy, which was performed on some women giving birth in Irish hospitals between 1940s-1980s.
Doctors would cut or saw through a woman’s pubic cartilage to widen the pelvis and allow for quicker delivery during ‘difficult births'
Doctors would cut or saw through a woman’s pubic cartilage to widen the pelvis and allow for quicker delivery during ‘difficult births'
This was not only dangerous and excruciating for patients but – worse still, doctors in Ireland often did it without getting consent from women beforehand or even telling them that they’d done it afterwards
Women would wake up in agonising pain and think it was just part of childbirth, or else would suffer long term side effects but have no idea why or what questions to ask or how to begin to understand what they were going through
It was a brutal procedure which left women with life-long physical injuries and psychological trauma. Many women affected are now in their 70s, 80s, or 90s and still live in constant daily pain, are permanently incontinent, and have experienced PTSD and post-natal depression
If you’re wondering why Ireland continued to do this up until the 1980s given how clearly flawed and damaging it was, that comes down to Ireland’s relationship with the Catholic church and the role that Irish society allowed religion to play in the Irish healthcare system
The French medical profession stopped performing symphysiotomy in the 1700s and most other industrialised countries followed suit in the 1800s and early 1900s when medical advancements showed how dangerous it was and how it damaged women’s health on a long term basis
Instead, medical systems in most countries increasingly used caesarean sections as a safer alternative. However, the Catholic Church was opposed to this as they felt caesareans went against the church's 'moral law' and they preferred symphysiotomy as being 'more natural'
So it underwent a revival in the 1940s and remained in use here until 40 years ago as a ‘natural alternative’ to c-sections. At least 1,500 women in Ireland were subjected to this but the real figure will be much higher as many women were not told that it had been done to them
Three very brave women who were subjected to this in different hospitals in Ireland in the 1960s have now taken a legal challenge to the ECHR. They claim that what happened breaches Articles 3 (prohibition of inhuman/ degrading treatment) and 8 (respect for private/ family life)
It’s a really important case imo because it exposes so much about how Irish society treated women until very recently
Similar to the existence of mother and baby homes or the abortion ban, it reflects how women’s autonomy and consent was constantly disregarded by a society which too often viewed women as mere baby-making vessels
It also shows yet another layer of how ‘Catholic values’ were used to justify appalling treatment of women’s bodies in Ireland and the inappropriate way in which religion was infused with medical decisions
Regardless of the outcome of the ECHR ruling tomorrow, this is another part of Ireland’s past which we need to confront as a society and how the legacy of this culture still shapes us now
