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A 74-YEAR-old woman has today lost her High Court action over a symphysiotomy procedure that was performed on her in 1963.
The woman had claimed that she suffered life-long pain after the controversial procedure, which involved breaking woman’s pelvis in order to aid the delivery a baby.
RTÉ reports the judge said that, at the time, treating doctors had reason to believe that the procedure did not generally have adverse effects.
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In a statement after the judgement today, Survivors of Symphysiotomy and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) accused the State Claims Agency of fighting the woman “tooth and nail in an attempt to justify the breaking of her pelvis 12 days before the birth of her baby”.
Spokesperson Marie O’Connor said the government’s payment scheme for victims of the painful procedure “places little or no value on survivor testimony and refuses to accept reports from independent medical reports unless these reports are supported by 50 year old medical records generated by doctors, many of whom are now deceased”.
Mark Kelly, Executive Director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties said the outcome of today’s case is “devastating” for the woman at the centre of it, but also symptomatic of the ongoing absence of effective remedies for other women in her situation.
“The onus remains on the State to ensure that, in all cases in which women allege that they have been subjected to degrading treatment of this nature, an effective investigation takes place and a remedy is provided.”
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Somebody should start a crowd fund for this poor poor woman, she should know that the public believe she was wronged, deserves redress and support! If it’s done I’ll be donating, I can’t imagine how she feels right now.
I would love to but ashamed to say I’m to much of a coward to take on the responsibility for it however I’m going to ask the author of the piece if they can find out if there’s somewhere we can make donations to support these victims. I couldn’t imagine what this is doing to this poor woman’s generaL health!
To think that this procedure was banned in France in 1798 … Holy Catholic Ireland should hang its head in shame . The suffering that poor woman went through !!
The way these women are being treated is absolutely disgraceful. is it not bad enough that they were treated so badly at the time and that they have suffered so much since? .
I’ll happily donate to a fund set up for this woman & victims of this barbaric practice in general. It’s bullshit that this was a good option in the 1950s! The same procedure was outlawed in Paris in 1798 as it was deemed barbaric. Yet some religious nut (Dev jnr amongst others) thought this was a great way to ensure a woman wouldn’t need those pesky c sections so she could go on and have loads of babies! In all fairness considering women were left incontinent and could barely walk and were in constant pain why on earth would you ever even consider getting pregnant again! I hope these women get the justice they deserve. They were butchered somebody is accountable!
It means any incompetent can can claim he/she “had reason to believe that the procedure did not generally have adverse effects”, even if he didn’t have a clue or was motivated by other than medical imperatives.
It’s like saying that when the Brothers and nuns beat the crap out of you years ago ‘it was the times that was in it’
You either have empathy or you have not. Breaking a woman’s pelvis, how could a trained Doctor ever have thought it was ok. ‘ oh that was the times that was in it’
Did those doctors ever go to bed at night and wonder what it would be like to have their pelvic bone broken!
I wonder how many hours of research the defending side took to ‘prove’ that doctors didn’t know this was barbaric? Surely the fact that it was later proven to be barbaric is enough? Guess they were told to hold flood gates closed until a few more victims have passed on.
This is what happens when you have a compliant passive people , this woman could be any of our mothers or grandmothers , it’s a disgrace, does anyone know how to start a crowd fund for this woman or who she is , we need to get off our arses and get rid of the establishment .
State rules again. That poor woman. The psychological trauma of reliving those events day in day out to a packed court room. How that judge can sleep tonight I don’t know. His hands are not tied. He is a judge. The state already offered every woman €50,000, and that was without a trial. How is it now that the judge can award nothing? Something is amiss.
Money waisted, paying lawyers yet again, while the victim isn’t redressed, enough is enough, we know these procedures shouldn’t have accrued, compensate them, ensured their health going forward , pay top class health insurance for them, and refund any expenses they have receipts for, above all in this cost conscious world stop waiting money on the courts
The judge’s reasoning was that, while it may seem unnecessary and barbaric now, at the time it was standard and accepted procedure given the knowledge available.
Make of that what you will but his hands seemed tied to some extent.
The problem with that reasoning though is that there was an alternative less damaging procedure available that they did know of but refused to use as it would mean limiting the amount of children the women could have which was against the Catholic ethos. I don’t think it took a lot of knowledge to know that a caescarean would do less damage to a woman’s body.
France outlawed the procedure in 1798 I think… that would suggest they were well ahead of us in figuring out what was barbaric. Beyond ridiculous result for this case.
Sarah you say France outlawed the procedure in 1798? This was also stated above in a post. So 217 years ago, before the advent of modern medicine, you are saying this procedure was outlawed by France? I think this highly implausible. How did they perform this procedure in the absence of anaesthesia, no knowledge of germ theory and no antiseptics? Would you lie there while your pelvis was sawed apart. I doubt it. How is this statement true?
I have nothing but sympathy for this poor woman being tormented still because of this barbaric practice.
On a side not – and as a woman of almost this age – those hands in the picture belong to at least a 90 year old
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