Greg DalyThe controversial term ‘fatal foetal abnormality’ is expected to be used in new formal guidelines to help health service workers deal with grieving parents, it is understood.
As The Irish Catholic went to press, sources indicated that new guidelines entitled ‘Standards for Bereavement Care following Pregnancy Loss and Perinatal Death’ would include the term which the State has hitherto not defined.
The guidelines are broadly intended to aid healthcare professionals in their care for parents dealing with miscarriages, stillbirths, and neonatal death, and will emphasise that the parents of children with life-limiting conditions are entitled to bereavement counselling, regardless of their circumstances.
While the requirement to offer counselling to parents in such circumstances will be welcomed, the use of the term ‘fatal foetal abnormality’ is expected to be objected to. During the debate in June over Mick Wallace TD’s attempt to introduce abortion in such cases, Every Life Counts spokesperson Tracy Harkin she and other parents of children with life-limiting conditions had “endured two weeks of listening to our children being described as ‘fatal abnormalities’”.
Campaigners
Describing how her nine-year-old daughter was living with Trisomy 13, sometimes classed as a fatal foetal abnormality, Ms Harkin asked whether campaigners would “now have to fight for her right to life and for the right to life of every child who has a life-limiting condition”.
Speaking on The View on BBC Northern Ireland in December, leading obstetrician Prof. Jim Dornan said that the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) disapproved of the term.
The former director of foetal medicine at Belfast’s Royal Victoria hospital and onetime vice-president of the RCOG was responding to a judgement by Mr Justice Mark Horner at the Belfast High Court to the effect that abortion should be legal in the North in cases of fatal foetal abnormality.
Prof. Dornan described how the Northern Ireland Committee of the RCOG had formally expressed concerns about the use of the term ‘fatal foetal abnormality’ as it was “unhappy with it”, continuing, “It’s in no textbook that I know of. No doctor knows exactly when a foetus is going to die.”
The guidelines were scheduled to be launched by Health Minister Simon Harris and HSE Director General Tony O’Brien yesterday, August 10.