Madam, – The horrors endured by home birth midwives in Hungary (World News, December 20th) are but a pale shadow of those planned for midwives in Ireland.
Agnes Gereb could face five years in jail for assisting at a home birth (she is being prosecuted for alleged negligent malpractice while assisting at five births in which the mother or child required hospital treatment): Irish midwives face up to 10 years if they breach HSE’s onerous terms and conditions. Now at Report Stage in the Dáil, the Nurses and Midwives Bill makes it unlawful for midwives (but not for nurses or medical practitioners) to practise without indemnity.
Making insurance mandatory is key to compliance with state bureaucracy: lurking underneath Section 40 of the Bill lies an invisible undercarriage of rules and regulations binding independent midwives hand and foot. Surveillance is tight: the HSE requires midwives to surrender client files before issuing payment.
Sixty years ago in Ireland, childbirth was women’s business. Having a child at home was the norm. Midwives were self-governing, albeit via a London board. Today, so powerful has the health bureaucracy become that women have lost their power over birth. Midwives have lost the freedom to practise autonomously. And women have lost a fundamental liberty: the right to decide how and where their child will be born. The terms under which midwives are legally required to work are also the conditions under which women are obliged to give birth.
However, there are signs of hope. The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that denying women the freedom to give birth at home denies them their human rights. The court ruled that the circumstances of giving birth “incontestably” form part of one’s private life and that under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, prospective mothers have the right to choose those circumstances.
Subordinate to a nursing board, midwives in Ireland have lost the freedom to rule themselves. They have all but lost the right to offer the services of their choosing in the community. They can no longer decide whom to accept as a client, or when a pregnancy ceases to be normal. And when a mother exhibits some change in her condition, however minute, that is deemed a disqualifier for home birth; their indemnity lapses. Care is to be withdrawn from the mother at home, even during the height of labour. New draft guidelines suggest the calling of “relevant stakeholders”, such as the gardaí.
This is the appalling vista that the Nurses and Midwives Bill will lock in, unless it is amended. – Yours, etc,