Our duty is to pregnant women of today not 2321
IT’S impossible to know what they world will be like in 300 years’ time but given how we’ve gazed so much into the future to figure out the new National Maternity Hospital’s fate, let’s hazard a guess anyway... With the march of reproductive technology, not to mention Artificial Intelligence, it’s not too much of a leap to predict that by 2321, childbearing may have long been farmed out to robots, with commissioning parents using a sophisticated shopping app to place their orders.
Peering further into our crystal ball, it’s also likely that advances in human gene editing will have removed all frailties from DNA, so health problems in newborns will be minimal.
Notions of gender will have moved on so much since the culture wars of 2022 that gender reassignment surgery may be a thing of the past. What comes to pass in 300 years’ time might make the Handmaid’s Tale look like a harmless fairytale or topple the dystopian prophecies of Greta Thunberg metaphorically into the sea. If my Madame Rosa predictions are right, we won’t need a maternity hospital anyway.
So why the worry about what happens in 2321 when the lease runs out on the land under our (by then) ancient National Maternity Hospital and control of our €1bn hospital possibly reverts to the hands of the Church.
It’s true it would be preferable if the new hospital was publicly owned and run so all legally permissible procedures would be available into the future without any ambiguity. But the State’s history of farming out services like healthcare to religious orders means the transition to
State control isn’t seamless.
THE legacy of the failure to provide State services exists in voluntary hospitals like St Vincent’s, charitable organisations like St Vincent de Paul, hospices and the overwhelming number of schools operating under Church auspices. We may wish they could be magicked away overnight, but that’s impossible and as we know from the shambolic HSE, the State’s not exactly in a position to take over just yet.
The cover up of clerical sex abuse, the long history of institutional cruelty, not to mention the eagerness of the Church to retain its influence by fair means or foul explains public scepticism about the mechanism whereby the Sisters of Charity have transferred ownership of their property.
Yet assurance about the total medical independence of the new hospital from the Attorney General Paul Gallagher, the leaders of the Government parties, not to forget former Holles Street Masters, albeit not Peter Boylan, have made no dent in the wall of suspicion that the nuns and indeed the Vatican may have ulterior motives.
Expert advice about the lack of guarantee of success over compulsory purchase orders – how the State could maybe gain control of the site – fall on deaf ears. As do pleadings from Holles Street staff working in Dickensian conditions to press ahead with the project for the sake of female patients, rather than squander a decade on a perhaps fruitless fight over a CPO.
THE intransigence of those aligned against the desperately needed hospital smacks not just of healthy suspicion but of a simmering anti-Catholicism, which while justified 50 years ago when the country was run like a theocracy is irrelevant now that the war between pluralism and Catholic authoritarianism is over.
And where the vast majority of young people voting in favour of marriage equality and safe abortion, constitutional provisions utterly at odds with Church teaching, nailed the charge church-run schools are hotbeds of religious indoctrination.
It is this generation of voters and their descendents who will run the new hospital. Jesus said, ‘by their actions, you will know them’. The actions of these inclusive liberals tell us the National Maternity Hospital is safely in secular hands. As for Vatican designs on changing that in 2321? It hasn’t a prayer.