Catholic Health Care: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (A defense of one’s own life)

At a pro-life conference in Manila in the ’80s, a Liverpool female GP, of Irish origin, stated that: “We can be very proud of our Church.”

She went on to say that “our Church is the only Church in the world that has stood by the principle of the dignity of every human life in the past thirty years … The Catholic Church is the number one health-care worker in the world.”

In the succeeding years, I experienced the veracity of her words. The best hospitals in Muslim Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, Buddist Bangkok and secular Hong Kong are Catholic hospitals (many with Irish connections). When people are really sick, the last place they go to is a government hospital.

In Nairobi, there is a Mater hospital founded from Dublin. Through outstations, it reaches the vast neglected rural areas of the country where the government does not dare to go. It is the same story all over Africa. And if that weren’t enough, one-third of all AIDS patients in the world are cared for in Catholic hospitals. The prestige of Catholic health care, and of being connected with it, is almost embarrassing.

Due recognition
The obstetricians who made the maternal mortality rate in Ireland in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s the lowest in the world have not received due recognition. O’Driscoll, O’Dwyer and De Valera (obstetrician) did so by promoting a “respect-for-life” agenda. In the Irish Medical Journal of 1970 Prof O’Driscoll has an article entitled: ‘Abortion, the therapeutic argument’, where he proves that abortion is never necessary to save the life of a mother. At the time, Holles Street became a world leader in the management of labour.

Every family in South County Dublin is what they are today because of the 24-hour service that has been available at St Vincent’s Hospital for the past 200 years. It was the best on the planet, and everyone knew it, whether it was for a sprained wrist in a rugby match, an appendix, or a dying relative. While working there as an intern in the ’70s, we had referrals from all over the country.

Against this global verdict of excellence, the recent insular complaints about St Vincent’s Hospital cannot be directed against healthcare with a Catholic ethos, but rather the respect-for-life ethic contained there.

In the list of 203 maternity complaints over a forty-year period, published recently by the HSE, nowhere did “Catholic health care” appear.

As another champion of Irish women, he wants them to have access to every kind of modern “services”, and among those services are in vitro fertilization (IVF), common in maternity hospitals. These involve the destruction of human embryos. But if your medical practitioner does not care for life, where does that leave you?

IVF has a 25% success rate, costs a fortune, and involves much psychological trauma. Naprotechnology has an 50% success rate, is non invasive and cheap.

Interestingly, China recently trained 50,000 teachers in the Billings method of family planning. Mainly because it is free, non invasive and does not endanger women’s health. It has also been proven to be as effective as ‘the pill’ (see the British Medical Journal, Ryder, September 1993).

The right to know

In the past thirty years, I have not heard  many health-care professionals raise their voices about the horrors of abortion (not even those of late term), their side effects, the side effects of contraceptives, or the morning-after pill – some of which can be fatal – some of which include depression, breast cancer, infertility, and regret. Or the dangers of badly staffed abortion centres in the USA and UK.

An Irish woman died recently in a botched abortion in London. You would think that the chairman of the Institute of Obstetricians might have had time for a comment, even if only to warn those young mothers who might be in the midst of an agonizing decision on whether or not to travel. This, not to mention the revealing Planned Parenthood videos that have surfaced recently.

You would think that the 3,000 young Irish girls per year going for abortion in the UK should know these well-documented facts, and have the right to hear them from leading obstetricians. (The figure is 100,000 in Italy and 22,000 per year in Singapore.) Leaders have a responsibility to inform and to teach.

The aforementioned Liverpool GP also said that “one of the first rights of women is to know, and women are not being told the truth”. Irish women would do well to check out the respect-for-life credentials of their obstetricians. Have they carried out an abortion? Have they discarded human embryos? If we know the form for the Derby and the National, why not on matters of greater importance? There is need for more transparency. Obstetricians need to publicly show their hands.

As abortion training is standard practice in most maternity hospitals around the world, it has to be presumed that most Irish obstetricians have performed at least one abortion, and possibly many. If IVF is common, it means they are regularly discarding human embryos. They are not exactly innocent bystanders.

In the 1983 referendum, in which I was involved, there was lamentable silence from the obstetricians of the country, with a few notable exceptions. Together with the lawyers, politicians and clergymen of all denominations, they said nothing. It was the ordinary citizens, along with 1,000 doctors, who like the dogs in the street, smelled the horrors of abortion. The eighth amendment was not Church-based – quite the opposite. It was a major battle, which, in the end, was carried by a two-thirds majority of the nation.

Protecting scientific truth

Some people like to say that the country has changed, but scientific truth does not change. It has been scientifically unsafe for the past fifty years to say that life does not begin at conception. The battle now is not just to protect human life but to protect scientific truth. Subjective sincerity, nice feelings, a desire to please some women – none of these are substitutes for scientific truth. Truth, in all its forms, is a profoundly liberating phenomenon.

When human embryos are used, frozen, and abused, there is an underlying contempt for every human person. An educationalist in the US, James Stenson, has said that universities today are experts in producing “technically skilled barbarians”. People are treated as things and as trash. There is a lack of care and respect.

The ethos of the golden age of Irish obstetrics has passed and has been replaced by a utilitarian, materialistic culture. Marx should be happy about how effectively his ideas have taken root.

Investigations will reveal the truth of whether there was a lack of respect for life in the Tuam controversy. If true, it will be an anomaly – it was not the norm. But we also have to ask, if IVF is now common in Irish maternity hospitals, does that mean there is a septic tank in each one, and if not, why not? Where are the embryos and how are they disposed of?

This could reveal a story that is much bigger than anything that might have happened in Tuam. These are government and tax-payer-funded hospitals. Where are the investigative journalists? Women should be asking where are my embryos? Should the recent demonstrations that took place outside Leinster House move to The Coombe, the Rotunda and Holles Street? If there is even the most minimal chance that these human embyros are persons – and all the scientific evidence is in their favour – then why are they being treated with such a lack of respect? People on the boards of these hospitals should be asking lots of questions.

Setting the pace

Why Holles Street wants to move to St Vincent’s is obvious. But for an independent hospital, would it not have been more rational to move to a general hospital, like Loughlinstown or Blanchardstown, with a more government-related history, rather than one owned and run by religious sisters? Proximity is not the only answer; nor that it is a university hospital whose reputation for excellence is second to none. You cannot argue with quality. It is the sisters in St Vincent’s and the Mater who have set the pace – and the story is the same all over the world.

In the description of the financing of St Vincent’s Hospital that appeared in The Irish Times, Diarmuid Ferriter, quoting a history of the hospital, suggests that a large part of the funding came from the government, through the Irish Hospitals’ Charity Sweepstakes. That needs further study to see how much of the sweepstakes actually went to hospitals in general, and St Vincent’s in particular, and how much of it was government money and not the money of citizens who bought a sweep ticket. I have my doubts.

He omits the role of Sir John Galvin. At the time, it was rumoured that the hospital cost £1 million to build and £1 million to stock, and that Mr Galvin, a very generous low-key benefactor, paid for half the cost. He may not appear in the history for reasons of discretion, but his picture, showing him at a prominent place at the opening ceremony, decorated the walls of the hospital near the main door in the ’70s, suggesting such a significant role. This was decades before the Celtic Tiger, when Irish governments had little money and less competence.

Over the years, when governments began to contribute to the hospital, they were subsidising the health care of the tax-paying citizens of South County Dublin who were flocking to this hospital – as governments were presumably doing with hospitals elsewhere – as a duty of distributive justice. Anything less would have been thievery. The government was not contributing to a religious order, or buying bricks in the hospital or the right to do so, on behalf of the citizens of the State at some future date, as some journalists now seem to suggest. It seems to be implied that the voluntary contributions of tax-paying citizens of South County Dublin to St Vincent’s had no value or relevance. When the government subsidised our education, did they expect to own us in the end, too?

To those who complain about the value of the land owned by the religious orders, where they have been running social services for decades, my advice would be for them to go and build their own hospitals, schools, care-centres for the blind, deaf, mentally and physically handicapped. Let us see how they do in fifty years’ time – and then we can compare. Otherwise it’s all hot air.

Stunning contribution

As the nuns pass out of the vanguard of healthcare, the only responsible reaction can be awe, gratitude and admiration for their stunning contribution. They have set the bar very high. Through delivering the highest standards in health care and education, these Irish women – many our aunts and grandaunts – have turned our primitive backwater into a modern state. De Valera (politician) may have been the figurehead and the voice of our fledgling nation, but a well-trained army of religious in every town and village did most of the heavy lifting. Thousands of doctors and nurses have been trained to these same standards, and have brought them to every corner of the earth. As a country, Ireland may have had little, materially, to contribute to the world, but in the health care and education delivered through its religious orders, she has spread these standards across the globe – and millions of people have been, and continue to be, the beneficiaries.

As our missionary orders deplete in numbers, the baton is passing to a new lay cohort, whom it is to be hoped, will further develop on that respect for life. Whatever form the new government of St Vincent’s takes, it is receiving a great legacy of respect for life in all its forms. The hospital has been a shining light in its 200–year history, and must continue. We need more hospitals like it.

Medicine, worldwide, is losing its soul. A new generation of medical students and medical practitioners must come forward – authentic revolutionaries who are not afraid to challenge the status quo, and to be conscientious objectors to the prevailing destruction-of-life culture. The protection of the eighth amendment will help that process, and its purpose – respect for human life.