A DUTCH couple living in Co Galway were given leave by the High Court yesterday to seek an order compelling the Western Health Board to provide domiciliary midwife services for the woman, who is expecting her first child next month.
The application was made by Dr Michael Forde SC, on behalf of Ms Olga de Groot, a project manager in telecommunications, of Ballynahalla, Moycullen, and her husband, Mr Luuk Hijlkema, a project manager for medical supplies.
Ms de Groot, in an affidavit, said the due date of their first child was December 13th next. In Holland, home birth was a normal option for expectant mothers. She was informed that more than one-third of all births there took place in the home with only a midwife in attendance.
Home births in Holland, as elsewhere in Ireland, relied on natural methods of birth using minimal gynaecological intervention. Midwives referred mothers to hospital only when their clinical judgment was that there was a medical problem requiring specific medical intervention. She was aware that since coming to Ireland only a small but growing number of expectant mothers elected for a home delivery.
Ms de Groot said she considered home confinement the best option for her. She had rejected the medical model of birth as practised in hospitals. She believed hospitals considered all expectant mothers as patients in need of medical care and she totally rejected that approach. She did not want medical intervention but a normal birth.
"I do not want my birth actively managed by artificially speeding up the process of birth," Ms de Groot said.
She was aged 28 and a perfectly healthy woman. Since becoming pregnant she had attended her GP and told her she wanted a home birth. At the time she knew nothing about how a home birth would be arranged in Ireland. The GP gave her the name of two home-birth midwives.
When she contacted them, they told her they were community midwives in private practice. One of them told her she did not take on births for first-time mothers, and the other that she was booked out and could not take her on.
Ms de Groot said she subsequently visited Galway University Hospital and was informed it was organising a home-birth scheme and that she could probably get a home-birth service that way. She was told the service would begin on October 1st, 1999, but did not get any specific details about the scheme.
She then learned the Western Health Board was the proper authority to apply to for a homebirth service. Following further contacts with the WHB she was told the board did not think the project would be starting on October 1st last. She was then getting quite worried about her situation. From information she had gleaned from the Internet, she took the step of formally writing to the WHB on September 7th requesting a home-birth service.
Last week the couple had decided as a last resort to seek legal advice. They instructed their solicitors, MacGeehin and Toale, to write to the board seeking immediate service for home birth, which, they were advised, was their statutory right under the Health Act 1970.