‘The murder of infants’? Symphysiotomy in Ireland, 1944–66: updated

via History Ireland magazine:

In 1944 the National Maternity Hospital (NMH) in Dublin pioneered the use of the symphysiotomy operation (see sidebar) as the procedure of choice in certain cases where the woman’s pelvis was deemed too small to permit a normal birth (termed ‘disproportion’). The NMH was Ireland’s leading Catholic-identified maternity hospital. NMH doctors were motivated by the perceived need to avoid the practice, common among non-Catholic doctors in Britain and elsewhere, of recommending sterilisation to women after a third Caesarean section (CS). The resurrection of symphysiotomy was controversial; one British obstetrician, Chassar Moir, speaking at a Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland meeting in 1951, called it ‘the murder of infants’. Despite evidence of a high infant mortality rate and other problems, the NMH experiment lasted until 1966. Dublin’s Coombe Hospital also adopted the procedure from 1950 onwards. The Rotunda did not adopt NMH practice, although the Draft report on symphysiotomy notes that, although ‘rarely used,’ symphysiotomy was employed there occasionally, mainly as a post-CS procedure.

Motivation for revival of symphysiotomy

Symphysiotomy was thought to permanently enlarge the pelvis, and therefore, when carried out in a first pregnancy, it might remove the necessity for a woman with ‘disproportion’ to face repeated CS in future pregnancies. This was a particular problem for Catholic doctors. Contraception was practised in most developed countries, making repeat problem pregnancies less common, and non-Catholic doctors advised sterilisation after three CS. Irish Catholic doctors were unable or unwilling to do this. They were aware of criticism by colleagues who believed that Catholic religious strictures disadvantaged patients. In the same period, research had been undertaken in the NMH on pregnant women with heart disease, intending to prove that it was not medically necessary to offer them information on contraception, sterilisation or abortion. One author of that research noted, in a telling phrase, that it ‘proves that good morals and sound medical advice are compatible’.


more from The Journal.ie:

Symphysiotomy victims tell the UN about cruel and barbaric childbirth operations

SYMPHYSIOTOMY WAS EFFECTIVELY banned in France in 1798. The procedure – now described as barbaric, torturous and brutal – was carried out in Ireland until 1987. Young women (and, in some cases, teenage girls) were subjected to the surgery which involved having their pelvises unhinged before, during or after childbirth.
“Their arms held down by midwives, their feet manacled in stirrups, high and wide in the lithotomy or ‘stranded beetle’ position, many recount how they screamed and struggled to get free as they were being operated upon, wide awake, in the height of labour, in front of a large audience of generally male students,” reads a 50-page submission to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT)...The Survivors of Symphysiotomy’s (SOS) complaint to UNCAT, submitted today, outlines how 24 hospitals and maternity homes across Ireland favoured the procedure over Caesarean Section, long after the practice had been discontinued in other developed nations. According to the advocacy group, the State failed abjectly in its duty to prevent “dangerous and maverick medical practice”.

“The performance of these mutilating childbirth operations in the absence of medical necessity and without patient consent constituted torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Ireland has violated its obligations under international law,” says SOS chairperson Marie O’Connor,” says SOS chairperson Marie O’Connor on the publication of the document, which identifies hospitals and doctors – including the now infamous Michael Neary ...Most of the women left hospital not knowing their pelvises had been broken during childbirth. The majority found out decades later – through the media – after a lifetime of chronic pain, walking difficulties, incontinence, sexual difficulties, PTSD and other associated problems. “In every case,” reads the submission to the UN, “the injuries inflicted by medical practitioners were compounded by their failure to treat them as surgical patients and this negligent care served to maximise the opening of the pelvis.

“Indeed, the success of the surgery in ensuring future vaginal births was premised on the partial recovery of the patient....The operations did not actually deliver a baby. They merely sundered the pelvis and made labour much more severe...

Influence of the Catholic Church

Women who had undergone symphysiotomies and pubiotomies (a variant of the operation which sunders the public bone and results in a compound fracture of the pelvis) were not treated as surgical patients. Often, they were forced to walk on their broken pelvises within a day or two of delivery. Survivor groups contend that the operations were carried out by doctors because of “religious zealotry”. They say that because C-Sections were associated with sterilisation and contraception, doctors hostile to birth control sought to widen the pelvis to enable future childbearing without limitation....Pregnant women were used as “clinical material for training purposes” in the three main Dublin maternity hospitals and the IMTH in Drogheda, according to SOS. For those medical experiments, the young, healthy women on their first child were the preferred choice and historical writings and hospital clinical reports show the selection was quite deliberate.. “At the IMTH, women suspected of disproportion, many of whom were of small stature, were routinely allowed to go over their due dates so that their babies, inevitably, grew bigger and more difficult to birth, thereby testing the potential of symphysiotomy more fully.”

Complaint to the UN

SOS says the performance of symphysiotomy and pubiotomy constituted torture under Article 1 of the Convention Against Torture as severe pain and suffering, both physical and mental, were intentionally inflicted on women and girls, for reasons based on discrimination – but for the fact that they were pregnant, they would not have had these abusive surgeries perpetrated upon them...“These acts were deliberately and knowingly perpetrated – without patient consent – by ‘persons acting in an official capacity’ – consultant obstetricians and midwives – with the consent or acquiescence of public officials (in the Department of Health),” the group writes...About 250 legal actions are due to be heard in the High Court in the coming years.

Here is more information about Michael Neary via Wikipedia:

Michael Neary is a retired Irish consultant obstetrician/gynaecologist. He gained notoriety when it was discovered that he had performed what was considered an inordinate number of caesarian hysterectomies during his time at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, County Louth. He was suspended by the Irish Medical Council in 1999 pending their investigations, and then struck off the Register of Medical Practitioners in 2003. As a result of the Medical Council's investigation, which discovered a number of alarming aspects to the case, an inquiry was set up in April 2004 by the then Minister for Health and Children, Micheál Martin to investigate the matter....During the inquiry, Judge Harding-Clarke's offices were broken into at least three times, she has said....The Inquiry found that Dr. Neary carried out 129 of 188 peripartum hysterectomies carried out in the hospital over a 25-year period, some on very young women of low parity. The average consultant obstetrician carries out 5 or 6 of these operations in their entire career. The judge also found that numerous patient files had disappeared from the hospital, obviously removed by people sympathetic to Michael Neary, she wrote. She was unable to find out who removed the files but believes the person to be female. She criticised the 'Catholic ethos' of the hospital at the time. Sterilisation was forbidden, contraception was unavailable, but she reported that 'secondary' sterilisations were commonly and sympathetically carried out on women who did not want more children but were forbidden to use contraception by the Church...A junior consultant pathologist at the hospital in the early 80s asked his senior colleague why a perinatal uterus specimen he received seemed to have nothing wrong with it. The senior consultant replied "that's Michael Neary for you".

Italy upholds convictions of 23 CIA agents in absentia

via France 24

Italy's top court Wednesday confirmed guilty verdicts against 23 CIA agents for the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian imam in Milan and ordered a re-trial for five Italian ex-spies accused of taking part. The CIA agents were all being tried in absentia in one of the world's biggest court cases against the US "extraordinary rendition" programme to interrogate alleged Islamist militants after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The 23 CIA agents were originally sentenced in November 2009 to five to eight years in prison and in December 2010 had their sentences increased to seven to nine years on appeal and ordered to pay damages to the imam. Italy's justice ministry is now obliged to make a formal request for the extradition of the agents, legal sources said, but the United States has already refused. All the agents remain at liberty but risk arrest if they travel to Europe.

As part of the ruling, the court ordered the seizure of the Italian home of one of the agents, Bob Seldon Lady, former head of the CIA station in Milan. Osama Mustafa Hassan, a radical Islamist opposition figure better known as Abu Omar, was snatched from a street in Milan in 2003 in an operation coordinated by the CIA and the Italian military intelligence agency SISMI. Abu Omar, who enjoyed political asylum in Italy at the time, was then allegedly taken to the Aviano US air base in northeastern Italy, flown to a US base in Germany, and on to Cairo, where he says he was tortured.

In Wednesday's ruling, the court also said that two former heads of SISMI, Nicolo Pollari and Marco Mancini, should be re-tried. The two had been acquitted by the appeals court in 2010 in a ruling that said producing evidence against them would have violated state secrecy laws...

Suppressed history of the Magdalene asylums: early template for Monarch programming

It's interesting that the general consensus on trauma-based mind control, specifically its representation in pop culture, seems to be that the purpose of programming is "turning innocent young women into whores", an idea that's being promoted all over the most popular conspiracy sites. Ironically, in many cases the purpose behind trauma-based mind control has been quite the opposite. Traditionally, many of the systematized abuses that makes up the Monarch Project were enabled by antiquated notions regarding how unwed mothers, orphans, promiscuous women, victims of domestic violence, and virtually anyone who deviated from social norms should be isolated from society and punished for their moral transgressions. In the mind control magnum opus, The Illuminati Formula, is this little quote which has been overlooked by many who are interested in the subject: "The Catholic Church is one of the largest parts of the network that carries out Monarch Mind Control. It is a fact that if the Jesuits can place in their programming what they call the “Keys to the Kingdom" Monarch Mind Control within a child, they will control his destiny...The Jesuits developed torture to a fine art in the Inquisition. Imagine the expertise they have brought to the Monarch Program which begins torturing children at 18 months onward with every sophisticated torture device invented.”

One of the main ways that the Church was able to gain access to children and young adults for programming purposes was through so-called charity services which were designed so that institutionalized torture could occur in privacy and without societal oversight. The Magdalene asylums were laundries where those women who had been abandoned by their families, or by society in general, were incarcerated and subjected to long working hours with no pay, corporal punishment, strict codes of silence, and other conditions that numerous independent organizations have concluded amounts to torture. The following article about the laundries provides added insight into the religious ideology that initially allowed the practices that make up the Monarch Project to flourish, although the continuing complicity of the Church in covering up child sex trafficking and other institutionalized forms of torture remains, for the most part, undocumented.



source: The Guardian

Ireland's Magdalene laundries scandal must be laid to rest

by Mary Raftery

The nuns had been dabbling on the stock exchange. The results were unfortunate. When a company they had invested in went bust, they decided to sell off a portion of their Dublin land holdings to cover the losses. The snag was that the land contained a mass grave. It was full of "penitents", the label attached to the thousands of women locked up in Ireland's Magdalene laundries. This particular order, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, ran High Park, the largest such laundry in the country.

The good sisters did a deal with the developer who bought their land. They split the costs of clearing the mass grave, exhumed and cremated the bodies, and re-buried the ashes in another mass grave, in Glasnevin cemetery. However, it emerged that there were 22 more bodies in the grave than the nuns had listed when applying for permission to exhume. Over one-third of the deaths had never been certified. The nuns did not even appear to know the names of several of the women, listing them as Magdalene of St Cecilia, Magdalene of Lourdes, and so on.

The final number so callously disturbed from their resting place was 155. All had died in the service of the nuns, working long hours in their large commercial laundry for no pay, locked away by a patriarchal church and society ruthlessly determined to control women's sexuality.

This week the United Nations Committee Against Torture (Uncat) issued a highly significant statement on the Magdalene laundries. It criticised the Irish government for refusing to acknowledge the pain and abuse suffered by women incarcerated in the laundries, the last of which closed in 1996, and called for a thorough investigation and compensation scheme. In doing so, the UN has focused international attention on what has become a festering injustice.

Ireland has experience of dealing with the sins of its past. A formal apology was issued by the Irish government in 1999 to the tens of thousands of victims of child abuse in the country's vast industrial (residential) school system, run by Catholic nuns, brothers and priests. An exhaustive statutory inquiry produced the damning Ryan report, and a redress scheme has now cost around £1bn.

There has, however, been a strange resistance to any official acceptance of the injustice suffered by the Magdalene women. The state has wriggled and squirmed, claiming that the laundries were private institutions and all the women entered voluntarily. Uncat has now firmly rejected this, confirming what we in Ireland have long known in our hearts. We knew that women who escaped were caught by the police and returned to the punitive and often brutal regime within the laundries. Generations of Irish people colluded in this, using the laundries when it suited them to clean their clothes and control their daughters.

Some of the women in the laundries were unmarried mothers, others were locked away for what was euphemistically described as their own protection. Yet more were young girls transferred directly from the industrial schools.

Mary Norris ended up in a Magdalene laundry for disobeying an order. A teenage servant in Kerry, she took a forbidden night off, and was taken away to a convent where the nuns had her examined to see was she still a virgin (which she was). From there she was dispatched to the Magdalene laundry in Cork. Immediately on arrival, the nuns changed her name – standard practice in all the Magdalene laundries. "When I went in there," recalls Mary, "my dignity, who I was, my name, everything was taken. I was a nonentity, nothing, nobody."

The only way out was if a family member claimed you, and Mary was lucky. She had an aunt who tracked her down and got her out after two years of hard, unpaid labour.

And that of course is the rub. Where were the families of these women? For a society that prided itself on its emphasis on family values, the large numbers of women and children locked away with no one to claim them points to a glaring double standard.

Irish society was deeply complicit in the incarceration of women and girls in the laundries. In what has been described as a culture of containment, Ireland locked up more of its citizens per capita than anywhere else in the world – not in prisons, but in psychiatric hospitals, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools. Anyone who did not fit within the cruelly narrow definition of good behaviour was in danger. more...

Psychologists and Torture, Then and Now

by Laura Melendez-Pallitto and Robert Pallitto, March 06, 2012

source:Antiwar.com


History repeats itself, Marx famously warned, first as tragedy and then as farce. In the case of U.S. torture psychologists, the “tragedy” occurred half a century ago when CIA-funded psychological research on electroshock treatment, sensory deprivation, and the like found its way into the Agency’s counterintelligence interrogation manual. The 1963 KUBARK manual and its later iterations were used widely by U.S. intelligence and disseminated to other governments in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The “farce” was played post-9/11, as psychologists became involved once again in aiding counterintelligence interrogators....The KUBARK manual cites Albert Biderman and other research psychologists as sources for the “scientific findings” that support its conclusions. Biderman, who died in 2003, was known for his studies of U.S. personnel captured by the Chinese during the Cold War. He examined the ways in which the Chinese military induced false confessions — often outlandish and implausible ones — from U.S. prisoners. Whatever one thinks today of the validity and cogency of that literature, the government used it to legitimize tactics and propositions that go well beyond the claims of the literature itself. KUBARK instructs interrogators to use protocols titled “Ivan Is a Dope,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “Mutt and Jeff.”

...KUBARK does not describe in detail the ways in which psychological interrogation methods (“clean torture,” as Darius Rejali calls it) are done. KUBARK merely recognizes that “chemical and electrical” methods are available (though it may be more specific in the redacted portions). To see how sensory deprivation and electroshock treatment actually work on the psyche of subjects, we must look outside KUBARK itself, at the research findings of scientists and the accounts of victims themselves. Naomi Klein interviewed one such victim, who unwittingly became a research subject for Dr. Ewen Cameron of McGill University (a psychiatrist) while Cameron was treating her as a psychiatric inpatient. Cameron administered drug and electroshock therapy on his patient that left permanent, devastating injury. Many years later, she discovered the cause of her injuries when she learned of a legal settlement by the CIA paying unwitting experimental subjects for the damages they suffered. By then, she had become completely disabled as a result of her “treatment.”

...The relationship goes both ways, however. While the drafters of KUBARK certainly utilized the research results to further interrogation objectives and to instruct interrogators in other countries, the researchers themselves certainly derived benefits from the relationship. Alfred McCoy notes that CIA operatives attended conferences in order to develop relationships with research psychologists, luring them with promises of research funding...Incredibly, some of the research results from the early years of mind-control studies resurfaced post-9/11 in training protocols for Guantanamo interrogators. In 2008, The New York Times reported that Biderman’s 1957 “Chart of Coercion,” which indicates the ways that communist interrogators used such coercion to induce false confessions, was provided verbatim to trainees in 2002....Three psychologists in particular have come to the attention of the media in recent years: Drs. Leso, Jessen, and Mitchell. All three have allegedly been involved on some level (research, training, consultation, and even participation) in coercive interrogation. All three are licensed psychologists in different states. Although licensed psychologists and human rights groups have filed complaints, to date none of their licenses have been revoked. Nor have they received any kind of reprimand for their alleged involvement in torture. more: