Social change and medical controversy

“Naught for your comfort” is a quotation from G K Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse and was used by Ian Donald as the title for his Charter Day Lecture at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin on 10th June 1972. In it, he discussed medical ethics in our specialty. “Something momentous is happening right now in our subject of obstetrics and gynaecology. In fact, ethical issues crop up more in the gynaecologist's practice today than in any other branch of medicine.” The 1960s and 70s were certainly a momentous era and to understand the problems we must cast our minds back from the twenty-first century, with its acceptance of ‘patient power’.

The modern point of view was well expressed by Melanie Reid, in The Herald, 9th July, 2002, a newspaper columnist writing about some hostile comments that had been made about the increased availability of the ‘abortion pill’. She wrote, “Developments which improve the quality of women's lives are invariably criticised for being too easy: anything which gives women less work, more time, and better control of their own bodies is greeted with suspicion and resentment. Many of the most fervent anti-abortionists are men, motivated by an apparent desire to control women's bodies, and utterly incapable of understanding the desperation of a woman facing an unwanted child. We live in an increasing sexualised society, where more and more people are consumers.