I HOPE Archbishop Desmond Connell will read this column with the same care as I read the text of the speech he gave at the a.g.m. of the Mater Hospital last week. He restated, with some new emphases, the Catholic Church prohibition of female sterilisation. That is the business of obedient Catholics: not mine.
However, the archbishop was responding to a question asked by the group which recently completed a review of the Constitution, which governs all of us, not just Catholics, in this Republic. The review group asked: "Is it permissible for a publicly funded hospital to decline, for what amounts to religious reasons, to perform what is a lawful operation?"
Female sterilisation is not allowed in Ireland's Catholic hospitals, though sterilisation is a perfectly lawful procedure and one quite often medically advised. It is also overwhelmingly endorsed by the people. The figures are there in the section on family planning in Women and Health Care in Ireland, the recently published authoritative survey which the National Maternity Hospital commissioned from the Economic and Social Research Institute.
An estimated 87 per cent of women in urban areas and 74 per cent in rural areas support the availability of sterilisation for both men and women in publicly funded hospitals.
I mention this not because I expect numbers to have any influence on the archbishop but to make the point that we are not talking about anything new or contentious here. We're talking about a long established and well understood procedure, which a substantial and increasing number of men and women is seeking.
It must be evident to Catholic clerics that it is very difficult for the rest of us to understand why we have to pay for hospitals that deny us this procedure for reasons best and, indeed, only, known to Catholic clerics. I do not suppose that forbidding sterilisation was part of the good news that Jesus Christ came to preach.
I suppose there came a time in the history of the Catholic magisterium when some father of the church or some pope or someone on those lines decided that the forbidding of sterilisation was ready for formulation. But the archbishop does not go into how or why the teaching came about. He leaves history out of it altogether, and the question of the authority on which sterilisation is forbidden.
He stresses, rather, that just because there are religious reasons for objecting to something does not mean that there are not rational grounds, too. About sterilisation, "the church", he says, "is simply refusing to participate in the violation of a patient's personal dignity. Nothing could be more consonant with reason than that."
I can never understand how prelates like Dr Connell do not see that if there is no reason to defer to them on religious grounds, there is no reason to defer to them on any grounds. Dr Connell has no special standing - for me - in defining what is dignified and what is not dignified. He tells me that "the body is the living flesh and blood in which our personal self grows and develops, expresses itself, enters into relations with the world of persons...
Yes. I knew that. That is why I so resent insults to the fleshly reality of girls and women, such as the insult of denying them service as altar girls, never mind as priests, just because their bodies are female.
He goes on to say: "As one treats the patient's body so one treats the very person of the patient: an indignity inflicted on the patient's body is a personal affront."
I agree with him wholeheartedly. But I do not agree with him that when a woman is advised that in her particular circumstances she must not risk pregnancy, and then of her own free will she asks for a sterilisation, she is having an "indignity inflicted" on her. Far from it. The indignity is all in the archbishop's way of looking at things.
He says that one might have expected die contemporary appreciation of the profound significance of the sexual constitution of the human person to have prompted new caution about the moral acceptability of the mutilation involved in sterilisation.
Actually, one might have expected feminist insistence on "the significance of the sexual constitution of the human person" to do many things, including to prompt a reimagining, on the part of the Catholic Church, of what being a sexually active woman of child bearing age is like. That it has not done so is suggested by Dr Connell's use of the word "mutilation".
WOMEN are in no position to be airy fairy about their bodies. They bleed, and their wombs swell, and they labour just like the animals to bring forth children, and then they feed them with their breasts and wipe the wastes and the drool from their bodies and shovel gunge into their mouths and in general sweat and strain to bring the young of the species through to independence.
The emotions that accompany sterilisation must be very deep. But I doubt that the abstract notion of mutilating the reproductive system causes much of the grief.
I wonder whether the archbishop is using sterilisation to approach other arguments about other things? I hope not that would be a very undignified thing to do with so serious an issue. But I am under the impression that sterilisation is in fact available in a hospital of which the archbishop is chairman, and that he, presumably, knows it.
I have learnt not to take what look like church/State clashes in medical matters at face value. In Ruth Barrington's enthralling book, Health, Medicine and Politics in Ireland, 1900-1970 (IPA, 1987), it is astonishing to see how often this or that churchman's statement was in fact promoted by interests within the medical profession itself, and how often these interests were concerned not about morality but about power.
The archbishop calls conditions that might be put on the funding of Catholic hospitals penal conditions.
Well, if we are - all going to indulge in a bit of atavistic paranoia, what about discrimination against me and all women? What about women's penal times - the last couple of millennia or so?
From Dr Connell's present address, Archbishop's House (I read in Ruth Barrington's book) his predecessor, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, advised the then Minister for Health that tampons "could harmfully stimulate girls at an impressionable age and lead to the use of contraceptives" and that the Hierarchy therefore instructed the Minister to prohibit the sale of tampons. The Minister promptly did so.
Episodes like that make me wary of priests when they pronounce on women's bodies. I do not suppose any contemporary Minister for Health will hop to do Rome's bidding with the same alacrity. But politicians can use women just as badly as prelates can. That's what makes me hope that it will be at the constitutional level that the question of who controls tax funded women's health care will be addressed.