Sir, – Jennifer Bray reports that the board of the HSE has approved the legal framework around the new National Maternity Hospital at Elm Park (NMH Designated Activity Company) as well as the constitution that will govern it (News, April 26th).
Prof Deirdre Madden and Dr Sarah McLoughlin, the patient advocate on the board, dissented, saying they “continued to have concerns regarding legal ownership of the site and building, and the governance and control” of the hospital.
The Cabinet now has a consequential decision to make about the future of the State’s flagship maternity hospital.
The NMH DAC constitution does nothing to address concerns about Catholic ethos at the new hospital. The HSE board has erred in failing to secure agreement that the constitution of the NMH DAC will include an explicit commitment to provide abortion, elective sterilisation, contraception, IVF, and gender affirmation surgery. Instead, “the purpose of the DAC will be to provide all “clinically appropriate” and “legally permissible healthcare services”. This is a major red flag. Providing services on the basis of a test of whether or not they are “clinically appropriate” makes access to services dependent on the decision of a doctor, not a woman.
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The 2018 Termination of Pregnancy Act gives women the legal right to access abortion without restriction up to 12 weeks of pregnancy and without any question of a test of clinical indication.
The term “clinically appropriate” qualifies that right and creates a barrier to abortion access. Women would lose autonomy in decision-making and the NMH DAC constitution would enshrine a justification for the refusal of legally permissible treatments.
The HSE’s decision clears the way for the Religious Sisters of Charity (RSC) to transfer their 100 per cent shareholding in St Vincent’s Healthcare Group to St Vincent’s Holdings, the new Vatican-approved private company owned by just two directors appointed by the Sisters themselves. This company will wholly own the new NMH.
The Minister for Health must confirm whether or not he has seen the details of the RSC’s original application to Rome for their share transfer. To proceed without full knowledge of the terms set by the Vatican would be a serious failure of due diligence.
The Minister must also explain why the Government would consider spending up to €1 billion on a critical piece of State health infrastructure only to gift it to a private company on the record as committed to upholding the Catholic values of the Sisters of Charity. – Yours, etc,
Dr PETER BOYLAN,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6.
Sir, – Your news report tells us that two HSE board members, Prof Deirdre Madden and Dr Sarah McLoughlin, “continued to have concerns regarding legal ownership of the site and building, and the governance and control” of the new National Maternity Hospital.
Deirdre Madden is professor of law at UCC, specialising in medical law and ethics. Sarah McLoughlin is the board’s patient advocate. Their dissenting opinions are most telling.
Yet the Minister for Health persists with the fiction that this new legal framework contains “guarantees around independence of ethos or a secular ethos”, as he told the Dáil on March 31st. If these guarantees were not sufficient to convince the full HSE board, how can they be expected to convince Irish taxpayers, at whose expense the new hospital is to be constructed? – Yours, etc,
BERNIE LINNANE,
Chairwoman,
Our Maternity Hospital
– Campaign Against
Church Ownership of
Women’s Healthcare,
Dromahair,
Co Leitrim.