One mother's story: Claire Kavanagh used to blame herself for the mysterious health problems that plagued her for the past 30 years.
There was the acute back pain, which meant she had to rear her child out of a pram. There was the fear of having another pregnancy, which put her marriage under strain. Then there was the 12 months it took to learn to walk again after her pregnancy.
"I wondered whether it was going on in my head," she says. "I've had a pain in my back since my fourth pregnancy and had painkilling injections over the year. It wasn't until I heard about symphysiotomies last year that it began to make sense."
Claire (60), a mother-of-five from Duleek, Co Meath, was one of hundreds of pregnant women who underwent an operation to permanently widen her pelvis as an alternative to a caesarean section.
Only now, however, is the true scale of the health problems affecting hundreds of women who had the operation beginning to be realised. The National Maternity Hospital, at Holles Street, Dublin, performed 165 of the procedures in just seven years during the 1950s. In Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, 348 symphysiotomies were carried out. The operations also took place in other maternity hospitals in Dublin and Cork.
"I didn't know what it was. It was never explained properly to me," Claire says. "I still remember it. It was a Sunday evening, August 20th, 1972. I had been waiting for 10 days to deliver the baby but nothing was happening.
"After around 7p.m. the doctor came in and said we were going to deliver the baby. I was put on drip and they tried to bring on the contractions. I was pushing and pushing, but they said the head wouldn't come. Then I felt what seemed like red-hot poker going through me. That was the breaking of the pelvis. I don't remember anything after that."
The after-effects were excruciating, Claire says. For a time she would faint any time she tried to stand up and walk. She couldn't lift or carry her baby, while she also had four other young children to look after at home. If it wasn't for the help of her mother-in-law, she says, she couldn't have coped.
Now Claire has joined a support group, Survivors of Symphysiotomy, in which she shares experiences with others.
"We need a tribunal or inquiry to investigate this," she says.