Irish Women Speak Out Against Brutal Childbirth Operations (blessed by the pope)
(remember that these brutal tortures, and the magdalene laundries, took place in a supposedly civilized country, with the full support of the rcc)
Irish Women Speak Out Against Brutal Childbirth Operations
Between 1942 and 1990 in Ireland, more than 1,500 pregnant women in childbirth endured, often without their consent, an operation called symphysiotomy that involves breaking the pelvis to make more space for the baby to be born and sometimes involving having their pubic bone sawed through. Others claim their wombs were removed without their consent. Now, survivors of these operations are speaking out – and they’re alleging that these doctors wanted nothing more than to control the woman’s reproductive health.
A woman can only receive a cesarean section (a C-section) a limited number of times, whereas a symphysiotomy would mean a woman could have as many kids as possible. In Ireland, many doctors chose to perform the painful procedure on women in objection to the notion of limiting a woman’s capacity to bear children. A known 200 Irish women who have received this brutal operation are still alive today.
“These doctors saw cesarean sections as a ‘moral hazard’ that capped family size and led to the ‘evil’ of family planning,” said a representative from the group Survivors Of Symphysiotomy. “They preferred to break women’s pelvises instead.”
Survivors Of Symphysiotomy submitted a report to the UN Committee Against Torture, wherein a survivor named Cora testified against the procedure. “I was screaming,” her testimony reads. “[The anesthetic is] not working, I said, I can feel everything. I saw him go and take out a proper hacksaw, like a wood saw…a half-circle with a straight blade and a handle…The blood shot up to the ceiling, up onto his glasses, all over the nurses … They told me to push her out, she must have been out before they burnt me. He put the two bones together, there was a burning pain. I thought I was going to die.”
Another complaint was that a surgeon in Drogheda – in the same hospital where many of these symphysiotomies were performed – removed the wombs of 129 women and the ovaries of others. Most of the women did not need the procedure, and most did not give consent. The complaints were first raised in the 1970s, but took until 2003 for the surgeon to be taken off the Medical Register, and until just last year for the women to receive money from a part of a redress scheme.
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“When I held consultations with survivors for the symphysiotomy report, many said the same thing,” Professor Oonagh Walsh of Glasgow Caledonian University told the Telegraph. “One woman said that the Medical Missionary nuns told her Gerard Connolly’s [who carried out many of the symphysiotomies] hands ‘had been blessed by the Pope’ so everything he did apparently had Divine authority. That culture of deference was very powerful and difficult to overcome.”
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http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2015/02/13/irish-women-speak-out-against-brutal-childbirth-operations/