PROFILE:Rhona Mahony, for all her protestations, is anything but run of the mill
Just hours after her widely praised address to the Oireachtas health committee hearing on abortion last Tuesday, Rhona Mahony was back doing what she does best in her day job at the National Maternity Hospital.
There were babies to deliver, ward rounds to complete, emails to answer and funding applications to submit.
She travelled to RTÉ for a quick interview, walked back to the hospital and was home in time to say goodnight to the children at 8.30pm.
Mahony, always outwardly calm and impeccably precise in her locutions, projects a “business as usual” image about her busy life.
“I’m just a bog-standard person,” she insists. “At the end of the day there’s still the lunchboxes to fill and the homework to correct.”
Yet these days are anything but usual for this 42-year-old Dubliner who has been catapulted into public view since she was appointed last year as the first woman master of a Dublin maternity hospital. Mahony, for all her protestations, is anything but run of the mill.
She isn’t the only obstetrician helping to keep the abortion debate on the straight and narrow; Peter Boylan (her brother-in-law) and Sam Coulter Smith have also made incisive contributions.
However, the fact that she is a woman who has broken through the glass ceiling in a traditionally male-dominated profession has added resonance to her remarks.
Mahony spoke to the hearing not just as a professional but as a woman, one who was personally offended by “pejorative and judgmental views that women will manipulate doctors in order to obtain termination of pregnancy, on the basis of fabricated ideas of suicide ideation or intent”.
There is also a “how does she do it?” element to the fascination about Mahony, evident this week in online discussions.
She puts in 12-hour days in a stressful job and spends the weekends on call, yet somehow juggles this with her responsibilities at home, where four children range in age from six to 14.
Belying her relative inexperience in the worlds of politics and media, she entered the Seanad chamber on Tuesday to deliver a calm, measured analysis of the abortion issue.
It was the kind of dissection of the issue that only a practitioner would make, one whose working life involves making life-and-death decisions about the women she treats and the babies they carry.
Clinical decisions
Hers is a profession charged in rare circumstances with making highly complex clinical decisions based on medical probability but without the luxury of medical certainty, she told the politicians present.
“It is imperative that we have flexibility to do so, to make decisions based on medical fact. It is imperative that we have legal protection to do this.
“What,” she asked, “is a substantial risk to life during pregnancy – a 10 per cent risk? a 50 per cent risk? an 80 per cent risk? a 1 per cent risk of dying? The interpretation of risk is not the same for all people.”
Directly addressing the “grey areas” doctors want the politicians to address in legislation, she added: “I need to know I will not go to jail if in good faith I believe it is the right thing to save a woman’s life to terminate a woman’s pregnancy. I want to know I will not go to jail and I want to know that she will not go to jail.”
Mahony’s two-minute contribution got the proceedings off to a good start and set the tone for the generally dignified three days of hearing that followed. One critic felt afterwards that the exercise amounted to “window dressing” but was forced to admit it was “thoughtful window dressing all the same”.
As master of Holles Street, Mahony is effectively chief executive of the hospital on a seven-year stint. With over 9,000 babies delivered each year, the hospital is one of the busiest in Europe, but its premises, which featured in Ulysses, are overcrowded and dilapidated.
A move to a modern building, most likely beside St Vincent’s hospital, is the top priority for her term in office. In the meantime she is busy trying to raise funds, and has set up a foundation headed by former ESB head Pádraig MacManus.
Raised in Raheny, Dublin, she is not from a medical family. The decision to become a doctor was an early one, from the time she got her first Fisher Price doctor’s kit for Christmas. After studying medicine in UCD, she followed the usual peripatetic route of junior doctors, with spells in many of the main Irish hospitals and a fellowship in Birmingham.
Her speciality is in foetal medicines, which means that she often deals with the kind of complex and high-risk pregnancies which are at the heart of the current debate.
Gender hasn’t been an issue in her career. “No one is bothered so long as I can do the job.”
She sees her elevation as the natural result of the rise in women studying medicine and then becoming consultants; one-third of the consultants in Holles Street are now female.
Female master
This month Dr Sharon Sheehan became the second female master when she was appointed to the post in the Coombe women’s hospital.
Outside work Mahony, likes to run a few 10kms a week “to keep my head clear”, and says she will read “anything, but especially history”. She credits a supportive but publicity-shy husband, who also works in the health service, as well as helpful colleagues, for helping her keep the show on the road.
Thus far she seems to have escaped the rancour that can attach to the abortion debate. Or perhaps all of that seems relatively unimportant compared with a job where, she says, “the good days are fantastic but the bad days can be desperate”.
