IRELAND
Aljazeera
Laurence Lee
In recent months there has been a welter of reports about the horror of FGM, or female genital mutilation. The health service in the UK, for instance, is having to deal with thousands of cases, but because FGM is ‘cultural’ politicians don’t appear to be able to do much to wipe it out.
While FGM has become a real cause of concern in the UK – the former foreign secretary William Hague was particularly personally interested in it – nobody ever said a thing about a practice carried out for many, many years in Ireland which is only now being regarded as a similar human rights violation.
It’s called symphysiotomy, or the separation of the pelvis. Put simply, it involves sawing through a woman’s pelvic bone and cartilage during a difficult childbirth to open up the pelvis and enable birth.
It was banned in most places before the 20th century, but in Ireland hundreds and hundreds of women had it done to them, apparently because doctors preferred it to caesarian section. Why? Because c-section limits the number of children a woman can have, and once a woman has been effectively spatchcocked through symphysiotomy the doctors hoped she could have more and more. After all, this is in line with Catholic thinking on family size.
You can see in the attached video what the effects of all this were: women felt butchered, their physical lives and emotional wellbeing wrecked completely by a medical hierarchy which seemed, to campaigners, to insert religious dogma into medical practice. As a violation of a person’s rights, often without their consent, it’s easy to see the comparison with FGM.
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