She Had Never Written to a Politician Before
It is late, probably. That is when these letters get written. The house is quiet, there is a hand resting on a belly that is only starting to show, and a laptop is open on the kitchen table.
She has never done this before. Never written to a minister, never felt she needed to. But this time she types it out anyway, and she says so plainly: this is her first time.
She calls the decision a "travesty." She asks why a woman can't choose the care she feels safe in during pregnancy, the way a man can choose private care for his prostate. Then she asks the country, in so many words, to stop failing women.
Her email is one of a pile. When The Journal asked under Freedom of Information for the letters sent to Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill about phasing out private maternity care at the Rotunda, there were so many that the request had to be narrowed to just three days. Of everything in those three days, only one message backed the Government.
Read the rest and you start to hear the same thing, again and again, in different handwriting.
One woman went through what she called a "nightmare" in the public system. The second time she paid, and she says it felt like a different world. Another woman lives abroad and dreams of coming home to raise a family. She writes that she has more say over her maternity care where she is now than she would have in Ireland. Another doesn't argue at all. She just asks a question: can anyone honestly promise her that continuity of care in the public system will ever really happen?
What are they asking for? It isn't luxury. It's a face.
The same consultant from the first scan to the last push. A midwife who already knows your name, your history, and the scan that frightened you. Someone to ring when fear wakes you at three in the morning and you can't tell whether the baby has gone quiet or you're only imagining it.
Anyone who has carried a child, or held the hand of someone who has, knows why that matters. Birth is one of the most exposed hours a person will ever live through. You are trusting your body and your baby to whoever walks in. How safe a mother feels in the hours before birth shapes the first hours of her child's life.
Then the official reply arrives. Continuity of care, the HSE and the Department say, is a "key objective" of the National Maternity Strategy. In the very next line they add: "in practice, there is no guarantee that a woman in the public system will see the same consultant obstetrician or the same individual midwife at every appointment."
A key objective, and no guarantee, in the same breath.
So the women's fear wasn't imagined. The system has now said it out loud.
Some of the letters come from people who have voted Fine Gael all their lives. They write loyally at first, and then sadly. One says the Government has taken choice away from expectant mothers and those who hope to be. Another says the party has lost her vote for life. Nearly 8,000 people have signed a petition from the group Our Maternity Choice, asking that this option not be taken away while the public system still can't promise a familiar face.
You can believe in a strong public health service and still hear these women. Many people of goodwill want both. What none of us should do is file these letters under "politics" and move on. They aren't noise. They come from mothers who give up other things to pay for one person they can trust at the most vulnerable moment of their lives, because they love a child they haven't met yet.
Somewhere tonight another woman will sit at her kitchen table with her hand on her belly, wondering whose face will be there when her baby arrives.
Will anyone in power read what she writes?
Voices of Life exists because too many voices like hers have been talked over. Hers deserves to be heard. So does the voice she is writing for, the one too small yet to write a word.
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