Pro Life? The Irish Question

by Michael Solomons
- reproduced with the kind permission of Lilliput Press (published in 1993).

Anyone who recalls the bitterness of the 1983 abortion referendum is unlikely to welcome a repeat performance. I would like to introduce a different note by describing the history of some developments in Irish society which are relevant to the current issues.

The debate on the substantive issue of abortion is being held against a backdrop of a medical service for women in Ireland which has altered and improved almost beyond recognition since I began my career in 1939. Some basic statistics will demonstrate this. In the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, between 1948 and 1951, when 12,010 deliveries took place, twenty-three women and 800 babies died. Of the 18,293 deliveries that occurred at the hospital between 1988 and 1991, there were 177 infant deaths and one maternal death.

Family size has decreased dramatically in the last half-century. Some 23 per cent of the women who were delivered in the Rotunda in 1943 had already been pregnant nine times. By 1990 only 10.5 per cent of women who gave birth were on their fifth or later pregnancy. Access to contraception, coupled with education and information about sex, have had a part to play in reducing family size and the incidence of maternal and infant deaths. Improvements in medical procedure, drugs and technology have also helped.

Nowadays women are given information and prepared for labour. Antenatal care is not just better, it is more comprehensive, being available to all women who want it. Anaesthetics have improved and we have better grasp of techniques for relieving pain. Abnormalities in the foetus and placenta can be picked up by using ultra-sound scanning and thus possible complications a t birth can be catered for. Electronic foetal monitoring allows medical and nursing staff to recognize a baby who is in distress at an earlier stage. Caesarean section is safer and a live-saving alternative to the difficult, assisted vaginal deliveries of the past. Infant intensive care is now available, saving the lives of the sick and premature. Blood transfusion and antibiotics have greatly helped.

Not all of these life-enhancing changes were easily come by. The provision of contraception and information about contraception within Ireland was rigorously opposed by the Catholic Church and other conservative groups. As a founder member of the Irish Family Planning Association, and as a doctor who advocated family planning, I often found myself at the centre of controversy. While debates about contraception and other sex-related matters raged, the more conservative elements in Irish society threw their hands in the air and mourned the death of Catholic Ireland.

From a position where there were no family planning clinics in the Republic until February 1969, there are now two in Limerick, one each in Cork, Tralee, Navan, Galway and Wexford, and seven in the Dublin area. These changes have not weakened the fabric of society, but have enhanced the quality of family life.

In 1983, believing that the proposed amendment to the Constitution outlawing abortion in Ireland would lead to confusion and affect standards of medical care and choice for Irish women, I joined the Anti-Amendment campaign.

Only five years before my retirement I was again at the centre of a major controversy. During the course of that debate it became obvious that many people found the concept of abortion strange and frightening. Fear and ignorance can be exploited by those who have no integrity and no respect for the truth. I hoped then, and I hope now, that as an experienced practitioner in the world of women’s medicine I could give people the facts and contribute to their greater understanding of the issues. What follows is not an academic study, but a summary of my experiences and views after almost fifty years’ work in this field.

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