Greg DalyFears for staff safety have forced the Health Service Executive (HSE) to conceal the identities of staff who advised changes to a document on challenging pregnancies which has provoked the ire of pro-choice campaigners.
Bereavement Care Standards following Pregnancy Loss and Perinatal Death, which details how the management of pregnancies where children were not expected to live, was published in July. It describes such children as having “life-limiting foetal anomalies”, recognising their conditions as “known to be life limiting” and giving a “poor prognosis of life”.
According to The Irish Times, however, earlier drafts of the document described the unborn children as having “fatal foetal anomalies” and being “incompatible with life”, terms regularly used, along with “fatal foetal abnormality”, by campaigners who have advocated changes in Ireland’s law in this area.
Clare Daly TD’s Protection of Life in Pregnancy (Amendment) (Fatal Foetal Abnormalities) Bill 2013, proposing the legalisation of abortions where a foetus “has a fatal abnormality such that it is incompatible with life outside of the womb”, was defeated 104-20 in the Dáil in February.
Following a freedom of information request, the HSE has disclosed emails in which staff discussed the document’s terminology, but has redacted the identity of the emails’ authors, with a HSE official explaining “I am informed that there are precedents where colleagues have been pursued in an inappropriate fashion”.
Section 32 of the Freedom of Information Act 2013 allows for the withholding of information if access to it could “reasonably be expected to […] endanger the life or safety of any person”.
Cora Sherlock of the Pro Life Campaign told The Irish Catholic that she believed the HSE had made the correct decision, but it was “unsettling” that it felt it necessary to protect staff who had “proposed perfectly reasonable changes”.
The HSE has said that all terms have been reviewed in conjunction with national and international research. A review of international medical literature published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 2012 revealed no agreed list of conditions that could indisputably be deemed fatal, with survival past birth having been reported in all conditions typically described as fatal.