The operation amounts to torture, according to survivors who have demanded an official apology from the Irish government and an independent inquiry. McCann says she never consented to the procedure, which she says has left a permanent gap in her pelvis. “The mechanics of your whole lower half of your body are changed because of that joint.” In cases where the pubic symphysis is completely severed, patients may get “earlier onset arthritis and joint degeneration,” O’Dowd says. The procedure can cause chronic pain and “rupturing of the bladder,” which can lead to incontinence, according to Irish physiotherapist Jessica O’Dowd. Roughly 1,500 women in Ireland were subjected to symphysiotomy between the 1940s and 1984, according to the government. Symphysiotomy is a surgical procedure whereby the pubic symphysis – the joint that holds the pelvis together – is cut in order to widen the birth canal during labor. McCann, now 88, was undergoing a symphysiotomy – a procedure seldom used by other industrialized nations by the mid-20th century as Caesarian sections became safer. He was slicing into her pelvis to make way for her baby. She assumed he was performing a Caesarian section, but he wasn’t. McCann, struggling against the searing pain, couldn’t see what the surgeon was doing to her. “I got a cramp down my left side and I could not move at all to get myself any relief.” From then on, it was “just agony, literally agony,” she recalls. “ I got a local anesthetic and the torture began.”Īs a room full of medical students and doctors looked on, McCann says she could feel the pressure of a scalpel cutting into her. “I was helpless and I did not know what was going to happen.” I was nine months pregnant, flat on my back,” she says. As she floated in and out of consciousness, she remembers being taken into a room with a single bed. It was December 15th, 1957 when she went into labor at a hospital in Dublin, Ireland. Rita McCann still remembers the day when her joy at the prospect of giving birth to her first child turned into sheer terror.
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