Dáil Éireann
Photo: Justin Pickard (Flickr) Imagine a scenario in which it came to be known that cars with defective seat belts had been allowed on to the market.
Now imagine that this information on the increased risk of passenger fatalities was known to government and all the major political parties prior to the sale of the cars, but they failed or refused to act on it.
As the ensuing scandal is debated, one of the main opposition parties stands up and declares that yes, we knew all about that seat belt business, but we are still the party of car safety and are committed to the highest standards of vehicle manufacturing.
It would be fair to say that such a statement would deserve to be met with justifiable derision and outright scepticism, regardless of the apparent sincerity in which it was made.
I want to suggest that something distinctly comparable to this happened last week when the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party brought forward a Private Members motion on the National Maternity Strategy.
The first line of the Fianna Fáil motion calls on Dáil Éireann to recognise “the need for Ireland’s maternity services to be as safe as possible for women and babies, including the need for women to be listened to and respected”.
This is of course a reasonable and unproblematic statement that no one could fairly disagree with.
What is profoundly unreasonable and deeply problematical is that it was made on behalf of a political party who practically guaranteed through its ‘Confidence and Supply’ arrangement with the government, that Ireland’s national maternity services would annually become a theatre of destruction for thousands of unborn children.
Aspiration
In light of that, it is simply impossible to ascribe any kind of credibility, or even sincerity, to the motion’s aspiration to make our maternity services safe for all mothers and babies.
The only way in which the motion could have been rescued from ethical inconsistency was if it called on Dáil Éireann to recognise “the need for Ireland’s maternity services to be as safe as possible for ‘some’ women and ‘some’ babies, including the need for ‘some’ women to be listened to and respected”.
A moment’s reflection should make this absolutely clear. For how can any political party logically insist that babies be treated with the utmost safety within our maternity services while at the same time reserving the right to facilitate the termination of thousands of unborn children “without restriction as to reason” for the first 12 weeks of their unborn lives and in extremely permissive circumstances thereafter?
At the very least, this also places an uneasy spotlight on the unavoidably discriminatory nature of abortion as ‘healthcare’.
What fills this situation with an even greater degree of conflict is the fact that the person who introduced the Dáil Motion, Fianna Fáil’s Health Spokesperson, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, was personally made aware on numerous occasions over the course of a single Health Committee meeting in September 2018, that the rollout of the abortion service within the framework of the national maternity services was fraught with danger and infrastructural challenges.
If we were rolling out a vaccination programme, we would need longer than this to plan”
This, let us recall, was almost a full four months after the referendum of May 25, which repealed the Eighth Amendment.
During the course of that Health Committee meeting, Deputy Donnelly asked Dr Clíona Murphy, of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, what was required in order to meet the January 2019 deadline for the national rollout of abortion within the national maternity service.
Her reply was as follows: “As things stand, we do not know the capacity we are trying to become ready for. There will be major public expectation for a rolled-out service and that can lead to issues. We have seen how if things are not planned properly they can unravel. I certainly advise caution and perhaps we should consider some phasing in or a pilot – that is my own personal view – so that there would be some understanding among the public that it is a short timeframe to roll out a separate health strategy.
“If we were rolling out a vaccination programme, we would need longer than this to plan. While we are doing our best in all areas, there needs to be more integration into the whole planning.”
Despite these warnings on infrastructure and capacity levels, however, Deputy Donnelly, the Fianna Fáil party, and indeed all the major political parties went ahead and supported the introduction of abortion services according to what was manifestly a political rather than a clinically-imposed deadline.
In passing, it might be noted that the word ‘deadline’ has rarely been so apt.
These events create further difficulties for the integrity of the motion that was introduced last week.
For within that motion is Fianna Fáil’s call on the government to recognise “the growing crisis in maternity care for reasons including: poor staffing ratios, limited diagnostics and the increased burn-out and stress for clinicians, together with a retention and recruitment crisis and chronic staff shortages”.
Yet these are the very issues that Dr Clíona Murphy and other medical representatives also highlighted at the Health Committee meeting in September 2018.
The consequences of getting it wrong are serious. We could end up with a termination done for a condition that is not fatal or vice versa”
This is most definitely the case with respect to the limited availability of diagnostics.
In fact, Dr Peter Boylan explicitly informed Deputy Donnelly at the Health Committee that when the abortion service came into force in January 2019 there would still be real concerns around the capacity to safely diagnose unborn children who displayed indications of a so called ‘fatal foetal abnormality’.
Here is what Dr Boylan told Deputy Donnelly after he was asked about the capacity of our maternity services to deal with this issue: “The MRI machine in the National Maternity Hospital, with some jiggling around, could possibly be a national centre for referral to clarify the diagnosis for women and pregnancies where there are foetal abnormalities. The consequences of getting it wrong are serious. We could end up with a termination done for a condition that is not fatal or vice versa.”
We need only look to the recent and tragic case in Holles Street to see that this predicted eventuality was far from being an exaggeration.
Ultimately, it has to be said that when any political party speaks passionately but inconsistently about protecting mothers and babies, then they will run the very real risk of coming across as incoherent.
Unfortunately that is the situation which the majority of our political class now finds itself in despite their efforts to maintain what has been described elsewhere as a “posture of reasonability and thoughtfulness”.
David Mullins is a bioethics commentator with a special interest in the ethical implications of emerging technologies.