Obstetric violence and consent during pregnancy and childbirth: the Eighth Amendment and its impact on the Irish maternity system

ABSTRACT

In the run up to the referendum on abortion in Ireland in 2018, women shared experiences of being denied abortion care through social media. The ‘In Her Shoes’ dataset is a collection of archived Facebook posts in which women shared their experiences of obstetric coercion, lack of information and lack of consent to medical procedures during pregnancy and childbirth.

Using women’s testimonies from the In Her Shoes database (https://repository.dri.ie/catalog/wm11nd02p), this research will critically analyse these stories. The paper will analyse women’s experiences in maternity care pre-2018 before the constitutional change. The article includes experiences of being denied treatment because of their pregnancy, being forced to continue the pregnancy when there was a risk to the woman’s health, as well as a lack of information and lack of consent to medical procedures.

The article puts women’s experiences at the forefront of the research and analyses their experiences within a medical narrative framework. It argues that the Eighth Amendment, not just denied abortion care, but contributed towards a medical culture in which the patient’s experience was not central to that care. Since the removal of the Eighth Amendment, we should move towards a patient-centered care approach to maternity care in Ireland.

KEYWORDS:

• Patient consent
• maternity care
• abortion

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Digital Repository of Ireland for access to the In Her Shoes archive. Thank you to my supervisor Dr Aileen O’Carroll for her guidance and feedback on this article. Thank you to all on the Archiving Reproductive Health project team: Dr Aileen O’Carroll, Clare Lanigan, Dr Kathryn Cassidy, Preetam Singhvi and Murilo Dias.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://dri.ie/archiving-reproductive-health

2 Administrators: Erin Darcy, Cáit Ní Charthaigh, Mary Lalor, Jac Sinnott and Cara Shank

3 https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.6t05h703d-1

4 Mother A v. Waterford Regional Hospital (2013); HSE v. B (2016); Ms Y v. HSE (2014); Fletcher (2014); Wade (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lorraine Grimes

Dr. Lorraine Grimes is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Applied Social Studies at Maynooth University. Lorraine has a PhD from the National University of Ireland Galway. She has co-authored a number of key reports on abortion policy including for the Department of Health in Ireland and the World Health Organisation. Lorraine has a number of publications focusing on reproductive healthcare and single motherhood in Britain and Ireland.