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Three Irish women who brought a case about a controversial surgical procedure to the European Court of Human Rights were told that the court unanimously declared the applications inadmissible.
Decisions are final, the court said.
Women received symphysiotomies before or during childbirth in the 1960s at three different Irish hospitals.
A symphysiotomy is an outdated surgical procedure in which the cartilage of the pubic symphysis is divided to widen the pelvis and allow delivery when there is a mechanical problem.
The three women said they were not informed about the procedure and did not give their full and informed consent. They also allege that they suffered physical and psychological trauma as a result of the procedure.
The three women, LF, KO’S, and WM, were born in 1939, 1934, and 1935 respectively, and live in Dublin, Co Cork, and Co Meath.
The women’s cases are among ten applications from women who had undergone the procedure at different Irish maternity hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s.
The women said that the use of the procedure had not been the subject of an internal investigation that complied with the European Convention on Human Rights and that, furthermore, they had not been able to fully litigate their claim at the level of Irish national law. .
One woman also complained that by allowing symphysiotomies to be performed, the State had failed in its obligation to protect women from inhuman and degrading treatment.
In one case, the court declared the complaint inadmissible because the woman had not exhausted domestic remedies. In the other two cases, it considered that the women’s complaints were manifestly unfounded, indicating that a question was also raised regarding the exhaustion of domestic remedies.
It is estimated that up to 1,500 Irish women underwent the procedure. In 2012, a draft report on the controversial procedure found that it had continued to be performed at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, Co Louth, nearly twenty years after it had been disposed of at other Irish hospitals.
Professor Oonagh Walsh’s draft report suggested that it may have continued to be used at Drogheda hospital due to its Catholic spirit. At that time, the hospital had an outright ban on artificial contraception, even as it became legal and widely acceptable in other hospitals.
A support group called Symphysiotomy Survivors strongly questioned the finding in the draft report that the procedure might be more successful than C-sections at the time.
The group described the government-commissioned report as “defending the current practice of symphysiotomy, a mutilation operation that often resulted in horrendous side effects,” and called for the statute of limitations to be set aside so that all affected women could access the courts.
Of grace
In 2014, the Minister of Health announced the establishment of an ex gratia payment scheme that offered compensation to women who had undergone surgical symphysiotomy in any hospital in Ireland between 1940 and 1990. Prizes ranged from € 50,000 to € 150,000.
None of the three plaintiffs before the European Court of Human Rights applied to the ex gratia payment plan, since they all believed that there was no possibility of recognition of a violation of their rights, among other reasons.
One of the plaintiffs attempted to sue through the Irish courts, but the High Court ruled that at the relevant time the procedure, which had taken place two weeks before delivery after it was established that a vaginal delivery would have been impossible, had been accomplished. a reasonable but limited option. The appeal to the Supreme Court was unsuccessful. After that, the other two plaintiffs in the Strasbourg court withdrew their pending cases in Ireland.
A previous case taken in Ireland, by a woman who underwent the procedure after receiving a cesarean section, was successful and resulted in compensation of 325,000 euros.
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