Church influence birth procedure - Irish Times today - harrowing

[BeingFluffy]

Warning - article is harrowing. Describes an "alternative" to CS by widening the pelvis. I was in tears of rage reading of an now elderly woman's experience and suffering. I can't believe this was an authorised surgical procedure. Did it go in the UK as well?

www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0612/1224317753223.html

The fact remains that it is part of the Church. You can't just pretend it isn't by blocking your ears and not listening. And blaming the teaching of the church on Irish priests seems quite prejudiced to me.

i am not blaming irish priests for the teaching, i am blaming them for the change in emphasis on the focus of catholic parishes over the past 50 years.

i am also blaming the english for lying down and taking it from culturally insensitive religious leaders.

i am also cross that english catholics in this country are frequenly tarred with the same brush as irish catholics on mn boards.

I think what ethel is talking about has a parallel in Islam as well; have seen discussion recently about Saudi-backed Wahhabi (sp?) preachers coming in to fairly easy-going mosques and just being a bit more...fundamentalist about it?

Yeah, it's the same religion in both cases, but there are different approaches to take to it. Different emphases the leader can make.

I am only a Catholic because I had one Irish great-, great-grandmother, so have nothing against Irish Catholics. :)

But--I do think it's right to say that there are cultural differences between Catholicism in England and the traditional set-up in Ireland. The Church here in England has always had much more counter-balance from other religions and cultures. Priests just haven't got the same authority that they once had in rural Ireland.

I know things have changed a lot in Ireland, though. It's a very different country from how it was, say 40 years ago.

thankyou @boulevard, that's a v good example

I suppose for me, that fact that Catholicism has the potential to be so fundamentalist and downright horrible, as well as the fact that it went that way in Ireland and is currently going that way again internationally under Pope Benedict is what convinced me to leave the Church once and for all.

Ethel Catholicism promotes those views. You don't want to hear them, so I'm assuming you don't agree with them. In that case maybe you should ask yourself if being a Catholic is right for you?

"You don't want to hear them, so I'm assuming you don't agree with them. In that case maybe you should ask yourself if being a Catholic is right for you?"

I was waiting for that old chestnut. Not that it is any of your business but yes I am asking myself that a lot recently. Leaving the church won't turn me into an anti catholic fanatical bore though.

I do realise that the church promotes all of those things (though we are not clear on the whole caesarean thing are we?) but my point is that of @boulevard. Different cultures focus on different areas of the vast philosophy of the catholic church. You may not like the fact that they pick and choose, but they do. And English Catholics fought long and hard to practice catholicism in a certain way, as have many countries, and I do feel that is threatened by a particuarly nasty Irish brand of the faith that I feel has nothing to do with me.

Fair enough, ethel, but as you say there is a lack of British priests and so preserving that type of Catholicism will be difficult. Personally I could never affiliate myself with a religion that is happy to condone the kind of shit the went on in Ireland. I know the population of Ireland bears a large part of the blame for turning a blind eye but the fact remains that it was the Catholic church who instituted the practices and kept them alive, with the blessings of Bishops, priests, nuns and brothers. Rome knew a lot of what was going on, particularly the abuse of children, and did nothing. To me that shows contempt from the very core of the religion and there is no way I could be associated with that.

I am not content with being a bystander, even if my ancestors were.

So, once or twice, I have been to Catholic Mass in the last few years. In Ireland. Irish priests, born and bred here.
And I am actually amazed at how liberal they are, about how they understand that marriages sometimes break down and are very inclusive to all. Not the type of guys at all to preach anti-gay propoganda.

I sometimes look at threads like these and wonder where these downtrodden, contraceptive-shunning, gay-bashing Irish people are, because I have lived in Ireland all my life and the only person like that I have ever met is my MIL.

@chip maybe they are all over here! (that was a joke...)

It was Pope Benedict who claimed that homosexuality was "a threat to humanity." You seem keen to blame Irish priests for views that are in fact espoused by Rome.

Going back to the point about the Catholic Church's role in Symphysiotomy
it seems pretty clear...

www.thejournal.ie/readme/column-symphysiotomy-was-seen-as-a-gateway-to-childbearing-without-limits/

Extract: "The surgery was an abuse of power, a pre-emptive surgical strike against the practice of birth control by obstetricians who disliked Caesarean section, on account of its association with what Archbishop McQuaid termed the ?crime of birth-prevention?. Undergoing four such operations was widely seen as the upper safety limit. Symphysiotomy, in contrast, was viewed as a gateway to childbearing without limitation."

Not necessarily disputing that, grimble but it is a newpaper article as opposed to a research document.

i'm from ireland. born in the seventies and i have heard of this but only recently and had no idea it could possibly be done as recently as the 80s. the catholic church ruled the roost in ireland for decades and decades with any dissenting voices jumped on. the abortion issue was so incredibly divisive in the 80s. with the disgusting things that have been revealed over the last fifteen years or so times are finally a changing and heres hoping the church will never have the same level of influence again.

I have been a catholic all my life ( 41 years ), brought up in a very catholic Poland . I can confidently say that I know the teachings of my faith inside out. I've always had great interest in philosophy/ religion stuff and read countless books/ articles etc.

It is categorically NOT TRUE that Catholic Church has anything against caesarian sections. What a totally bizarre notion ! Never ever heard of it in all my life . And incidentally my three children were born this way.

No idea about the particular incident in the article linked to by OP. But the decisions taken would be due to individuals, not the teachings of the church.
It is a shame that OP saw 2 and 2, concluded it must be 5 and proceeded to broadcast her ignorant totally false conclusion, spreading more predjudice and hatred towards catholic people.

Imagine a foreigner discovering that the NHS healthcare does not provide totally free dental treatment to everyone, and that foreigner coming to a conclusion that it's because the British believe oral care is wrong and immoral. Then he proceeds to rave how pathetic and idiotic the British are.

This is exactly how this thread reads to a catholic. BIZARRE

Have you read the article twinkle? There are no "foreigners" involved, it is Irish Catholics themselves who have pointed out that the decision to deny women caesarian sections was due to the Catholic orders who ran the hospitals being against them. That's not to say the decision came from Rome. The point is, sympysiotomies were carried out in Catholic hospitals under the pretence that it was better for women as their fertility wouldn't be compromised and thus it was in line with their Catholic ethos.

Doctors being forbidden by priests to advise women that unrestricted childbearing might harm them is the key issue here. And the main secondary problem is that the patriarchal, uptight, hypocritical, semi-fascist leaders of Irish society were happy to allow church and state to become virtually synonymous. Sending anyone causing family shame or social problems to England or to the nuns, was routine, and the ordinary people shut their eyes to these abuses.

But the data don't really support the hypothesis that these abuses included wanton maiming and killing of childbearing women
Ireland's amazingly low maternal death rate and see page 8 for international comparisons of rates from 1980 onwards.

Current issues in Irish maternity care and the historical background

Symphysiotomy in 2010 is of some value where medical facilities are poor, and according to this Draft report on the use of Symphysiotomy in Ireland this applied there for many years.

Crying and angry.
Ashamed to have ever been Catholic. There's no way to officially quit but if there was I would.
The chuch is an unholy hypocritical sanctuary for abusers and particularly sexual abuse...and this is sexual abuse badly veiled as medical or something. Its abuse. Its wrong. Its time the Church was called to account.
I can only hope the hell the church believes in becomes a reality for the perpetrators and facilitators and those who covered things up in the church!

'The report states that, overall, symphysiotomy was not used very often in Irish hospitals.

Between 1950 and 1955, when the practice was close to its peak, it was used on average in one in every 200 deliveries (or 0.5 per cent of births) in the Coombe and National Maternity Hospitals in Dublin.

Between 1960 and 1965, it was used in one in every 100 deliveries (1 per cent) at Our Lady of Lourdes. Figures for the scale of the practice in Drogheda for most of the 1950s are not available.

Preliminary figures show that Our Lady of Lourdes had the highest number of symphysiotomies (378), followed by the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin (281), the Coombe hospital, Dublin (242), Cork University Maternity Hospital (51) and the Rotunda, Dublin (24).'

A quote from the Times article. The Rotunda was a non-Catholic hospital. The other hospitals were Catholic-run. I think this shows an ethos that was definitely church inspired that put the delivery of a healthy baby well ahead of the health of the mother and the future sexual relationship of the parents. It is notable that these numbers reflect care in hospitals treating a lot of public urban patients, not places like Mount Carmel.. The Drogheda hospital is an anomaly because that was a small town in a mostly rural area.

Fear and hatred of women and sex in general dominated Irish culture for a long time. There was and remains a brutal attitude towards women that is expressed by the OB/GYN professionals.

I know someone who recently suffered a horrible tear in Holles Street and another who was basically butchered in the course of an emcs. Women going public there are supposed to suck it up, accept the right of utterly misogynistic bitches masquerading as post natal nurses to treat them like shit, to accept dirty communal showers and a complete lack of basic human decency, forget about adequate nursing care. You can have a relatively low maternal mortality rate and still end up with women who are shattered both physically and emotionally by their experience of childbirth.

I don't think it is as rare an operation as we would like to think it is.