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The headlines have been awash this week with the sobering news that external reviews have been launched into the delivery of nine babies in Portiuncula University Hospital in Galway. The HSE has appointed a “highly experienced management team” to oversee and manage maternity services at the hospital over the coming months.
The team started working on site at the embattled hospital on Monday, and they will now be fully responsible for managing and supporting all aspects of maternity, gynaecology, and neonatal services in the wake of developments which have plunged Portiuncula into crisis mode. In a statement, the regional clinical director at HSE West and North West, Dr Pat Nash, said: “I want to firstly apologise to all those women and families for whom this news will be worrying or upsetting.
“We are making these changes now to ensure that the maternity service at Portiuncula is as safe as possible for mothers and their babies.”
Dr Nash continued: “External reviews are currently underway into the delivery of nine babies in PUH. Since 2024, seven babies had hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), resulting in six of those babies being referred for neonatal hypothermic treatment — also referred to as neonatal cooling.
“In 2023, two stillbirths occurred at the hospital. The care provided in relation to these two deliveries is also currently being reviewed externally.”
It all makes for very distressing reading. A campaign group made up of mothers who have lost babies at the helm of Irish maternity services, Safer Births Ireland, said it was “sincerely lost for words and so deeply sorry to the families who have been so catastrophically impacted by the loss and injuries of their Babies at Portiuncula Hospital.”
“We query how many more babies outside of the 9 reported here in Portiuncula Hospital Galway are under review throughout our 19 Maternity Hospitals?” a press release from the group added.
The back-to-back headlines detailing an appalling crisis in Ireland’s maternal healthcare services should strike us as odd, surely? Because, in the years leading up to the 2018 abortion referendum, the public were promised time and time again that Ireland would have the safest maternal healthcare system in the world if we were able to secure a repeal of the eighth amendment.
Abortion was key to a safer system, we were repeatedly told, even though for years, Ireland without abortion had been one of the safest countries in the world for a mother to have a baby. Yet the majority of people in this country placed their trust in the promises of abortion activists who now don’t have very much to say about the deterioration in maternal healthcare.
‘Safe’ was a gold-plated buzzword throughout the repeal campaign. There was a clear promise that introducing abortion on demand would make women safer, and our maternal healthcare system better. It would make their experience of being in a maternity unit safer, so went the campaign promises.
The abject mistruth made so popular by the Repeal campaign was that the 8th amendment was negatively affecting how doctors provided care for pregnant women. And we all know that if you throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick.
The facts at the time though, as laid out by the Save 8 campaign, but buried by a lot of the legacy media, revealed that Ireland was one of the safest places in the world to have a baby. Doctors like consultant obstetrician Dr John Monaghan joined the campaign, saying he had never felt in his career that the care of a woman or her baby had been compromised by the eighth amendment.
“I don’t feel that I’m prohibited from providing the best care to women by the eighth amendment. Ireland’s a very safe place to have a baby,” consultant obstetrician Dr Trevor Hayes added. “The statistics show that we are safer from women dying or from getting very ill in Ireland than the UK or the US.”
This view was testified to by hundreds of medical professionals, who were largely sidelined by repeal-supporting press, but who agreed that the eighth amendment had not restrict doctors in treating mothers.
It quite clearly seems as though, as a country, we care less and less about the safety of women and babies post-Repeal. Who could forget that in 2019, as soon as abortion became legal, funds for the National Maternity Strategy were diverted, because, then Minister for Health Simon Harris needed the money to provide abortions.
According to Róisín Molloy, a patient representative on the National Maternity Strategy steering group, “the money that had been intended to go on the maternity strategy was effectively being spent on abortion services since January of this year”. The same government who have maintained an obsessive focus on abortion stripped money away from a vital strategy to ensure women did not die in pregnancy, and instead quietly allocated that money to funding abortion.
In 2023, the implementation of the national maternity strategy was again underfunded – to the tune of almost €9 million – due to the absence of any new development funding, as reported by the Medical Independent. The following October, it was reported that then Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly had been unsuccessful in obtaining additional funding for the maternity strategy for 2024.
Yet, he had been able, separately, to announce that because abortion was a “main priority,” he was able to recruit more senior staff “specifically tasked” to provide terminations. There has always been money for abortion, and more of it, from a cash-strapped Department of Health who had to resort to placing a freeze on the recruitment of junior doctors due to “financial constraints” after orders on Donnelly to make savings in the region of €600 million in health spending last year.
What is deeply illuminating is that almost seven years on, we’ve not only seen a jaw-dropping rise in abortions to 10,000 a year (we were also promised the abortion rate wouldn’t go up) but we have seen women dying of sepsis in our hospitals. Where is the media clamour to target the same factors which caused the death of Savita Halappanavar from sepsis? Since then, multiple women have died with the apparent causes being sepsis and staff shortages, including Aoife Johnson in Limerick, Marie Downey also from Limerick, a woman who had just given birth to a little boy. Her little baby boy Darragh also died two days later.
Last year, there were three maternal deaths in Ireland in one week, at University Hospital Kerry, Cork University Hospital and Our Lady of Lourdes hospital in Drogheda. In 2022, it emerged that there were four maternal deaths reported by the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin that year.
Since 1985, and prior to repeal, as a country we had one of the world’s lowest rates of maternal death, consistently ranking around joint 6th in Europe and the world.Yet, while our maternal mortality rate in 2018 was 5.00, by the following year, in 2019, the rate had increased to 6.00, a 20 per cent increase compared to 2019.
With what looks to be a rise in maternal mortality has coincided with a rise in neonatal deaths and stillbirths. There were 152 neonatal deaths (deaths of infants under 4 weeks) in 2021, an increase of 18 on the 2020 figure. The neonatal mortality rate per 1,000 live births was 2.5 in 2021, an increase of 0.1 from 2020, according to a CSO report. The same report sadly highlighted how the number of stillbirths registered in 2021 was 122, an increase of 2 on the 2020 figure. The neonatal death rate was 2.3 in 2018, but figures from Q2 in 2024 showed that the neonatal mortality rate per 1,000 live births had risen to 2.8.
While the figures fluctuate for a variety of reasons, there is no doubt that a prioritisation of abortion by this government has very likely not made women or babies safer. In fact, judging by the statistics we have, women and babies in our healthcare system seem to be worse off now. It seems quite clearly to be the case that now that abortion is legal, and will likely be expanded further, it’s perfectly acceptable to be silent on safety.
Kicking up a fuss about such tragedies does not generate political capital in the way promising to drop the three-day wait does. It’s simply not fashionable for the politicians in power in this country to prioritise the safety and health of women and their babies in the way it has been to drone on and on about Ireland’s apparent “success” in repealing the eighth. But the truth is that abortion was never going to make women or babies safer. It hasn’t. We do not have a state of the art healthcare system.
The promised feminist utopia of a healthcare model people were disingenuously promised does not exist. In fact, sometimes it seems as if things are falling apart at the seams.
Might the preoccupation with more abortion and more abortion doctors have led to other priorities in our under-funded healthcare system suffering as a result? Perhaps this inquiry will shed some light on where the State’s priorities lie.
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