Poisoning mothers who were protecting the unborn

IN September 1983, seven years after the hepatitis C scandal began, but 11 years before it became public, the people of Ireland voted to include a clause in the Constitution acknowledging "the right to life of the unborn".

For the previous year and a half, in a debate that raged in television and radio studios, in the Dail and Seanad, at public meetings in hotels, parish halls and community centres in every corner of the State, and even on the streets, the unborn were the burning question. We had foetuses in bottles and in wombs, on discreet lapel badges and on garish posters, on billowing banners and on foaming lips.

And, from time to time in the 14 years since then, the unborn have been more like the undead, rising to haunt the land, stirring up passion and confusion, disgust and despair, rage and irritation.

Words have been pored over and parsed. Abstractions have driven people to distraction. Men in white coats and men in wigs have made sonorous declarations. The High Court, the Supreme Court, the arena of the Dail and the chamber of the Seanad have been the settings for an endless series of inconclusive dramas. We have been at it again of late.

Meanwhile, during all of this time, thousands of ordinary women all over Ireland were thinking in a different way about their unborn children. For each individual woman, "the protection of unborn life" was not a legal or theological formula, but a reality of blood and body. She had borne a child, and found that its blood was not the same as her own. She had been told that when she gave birth, the baby would leave behind some of its blood. She would develop antibodies.

And she therefore had to think, not about her born child, but about her unborn children. She had to face those figments of the future, not as possibilities or abstractions but as realities in the here and now. Unless she agreed immediately to be injected with a blood product - anti-D immunoglobulin - the antibodies in her blood stream would cross the placenta and attack the next foetus to occupy her womb. This unborn child, as yet uncontemplated and unconceived, would be damaged and probably killed.

THESE women - and there have been 60,000 of them since 1976 - did not conform to the image of womanhood that ran through the rhetoric of public debate. They were not baby-killers. They were not dupes of an international conspiracy to foist abortion on Holy Catholic Ireland. They were not disembodied wombs, baby-bearing machines whose working parts could be discussed in the abstract medicalese of fallopian tubes and ectopic pregnancies. Neither were they temples of the Holy Spirit inhabited by the sanctifying grace of Motherhood.

They were just pro-lifers: women who, immediately after the pain and exhaustion of one labour, were prepared to think about the consequences of going through it all again, and to take into their own bodies the responsibility for a life not yet begun. Their concern for the children of the future was, literally, in the blood. And, for their trouble, this holy State of ours poisoned them.

While these women were protecting the unborn, who was protecting them? Over this period, besides Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin, the Ministers for Health were Brendan Corish, Charles Haughey, Michael Woods, Barry Desmond, Mary O'Rourke, Rory O'Hanlon and John O'Connell. According to the report of the Hepatitis C tribunal, each and every one of them failed to ensure the kind of reasonable supervision of the BTSB that might have stopped that organisation from poisoning Irish mothers.

Many of these Ministers played an active role in the campaign to put an acknowledgment of "the right to life of the unborn" into the Constitution. Brendan Corish, Minister for Health when Brigid McCole was infected, signed a SPUC pledge before the June 1981 election, promising to defend the life of the unborn. Charles Haughey, Minister for Health in the critical period of 1977 to 1979, when most of the women who now have the virus were being infected, led the government that drafted the wording of the amendment, and he gave it his full support.

Michael Woods, Minister for Health between 1979 and 1981, and again for much of 1982, argued fiercely and passionately for the total protection of unborn life. In Longford-Westmeath, the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) received the unqualified support of Mary O'Rourke, who subsequently became Minister for Health. In Cavan-Monaghan, Rory O'Hanlon, then Minister of State at the Department of Health, and who was to head the Department after 1987, was an enthusiastic supporter of PLAC.

ALL of these Ministers for Health were undoubtedly sincere in their passionate protestations of interest in protecting the lives of unborn children. But there is nevertheless an extraordinary gap, even by the standards of Irish politics, between the rhetoric and the reality. While the unborn were being evoked as the essence of holiness, the most sacred trust of the State, the mothers who were actually protecting them, were being poisoned, abused and exploited by that same State.

Or perhaps the gap between the rhetoric and the reality was not so great after all. For behind the anti-D disaster lies a set of attitudes to women that was also manifest in so many of the debates on abortion. The BTSB treated women as abstract objects. Patient X, whose blood was taken without her knowledge or consent and used to make antiD, was treated as if she were a mine or a bog, a natural source of raw materials. She was not worth talking to, not a thinking, autonomous person with a right to say "yes" or "no", to make an informed choice about her own body.

The women who received that infected plasma were, likewise, treated as objects, not as lives. They were numbered doses, patients who should be flattered by the condescension of experts and grateful for the bounty they were being offered. They had wombs and bloodstreams, not hearts and minds. If they had been envisaged as whole human beings with hopes and dreams, families and friends, jobs and responsibilities, their lives could not have been so casually disregarded.

That same set of abstractions continues to run through much of the rhetoric about abortion, much of it generated by medical experts. The totality of women's lives, the complex weave of necessities and choices, is reduced to a few arrogant certainties. Wombs are pictured and spoken of as if they had no bodies attached, as if they could be divorced from the brains and senses of real people.

We now have no excuse for not knowing how deadly such abstractions can be. We now know what happens when medical and political institutions wrap themselves in a protective cloak of self regard, when the certainty that comes from knowing that they must be right seals them off from the consequences of their actions.

Knowing what we now know, we should never again leave the lives of mothers in the hands of people who have injected themselves with the deadly virus of self-righteous arrogance.