One Woman’s Death Reveals Truth and History Behind Ireland’s Abortion Laws
Savita Halappanavar, a young Indian woman died in University Hospital Galway on the 28th October 2012. Savita had presented at the hospital with her husband Praveen on the 21st October with severe back pain. She was 17 weeks pregnant and found to be miscarrying.
Her request for a termination was refused because the fetal heartbeat was still present. Savita went into septic shock after spontaneously delivering a female fetus three days after she was admitted. She died in intensive care at 1.09am.
The Health Information and Quality Authority published a report into the incident. The full inquest on Savita’s death opened on the 8th April 2013 and concluded on the 17th April with the jury returning a unanimous verdict of medical misadventure. It is alleged that the confusion arising the 1992 Constitutional ruling on the X case—that a woman whose life is at risk can be given a termination—formed a significant strand in the appalling lapses of care Savita endured.
“As long as there is a fetal heartbeat we can’t do anything,” said the consultant in response to Savita’s first request to terminate her pregnancy. In this situation, the Irish legal system constrained Savita’s rights regarding her reproductive choice. Since there are people who regard abortion as murder, abortion cannot be recognized as a private matter between consenting adults, so the law is enlisted to provide set protocol on the issue.
Abortion is a central moral issue that calls into question the authority of traditional Catholic values in Ireland. Ireland has often been regarded as the ‘last bastion of moral and sexual purity and of the traditional family’ within western society and it is alleged that by permitting liberating abortion legislation Ireland’s distinctive national identity would be lost as a result.
Despite Ireland being synonymous with sexual repression there was never anything ‘Irish’ or inevitable about it. The reason women’s rights are so lacking can be traced to changes in the form of the family and the way reproduction was organized from the middle of the 19th century.
In 1861, a post-Famine Ireland saw the population almost halve from 8 million to 4.5 million. The Catholic Church offered religious explanations to the survivors. Providing spiritual consolation, the Church gained access into Irish family life. It preached the centrality of marriage and warned Irish men and women that sexual activity not aimed at procreation was evil. During an era of great patriarchal control this ideology entered into Irish law. This was a time when the development of the medical profession was a male dominated domain, authorizing men to assume control over women’s reproduction.
Irish law has stripped one strand of crisis pregnancy intervention out of the hands of ordinary men and women. By using the means of the moral principle of the church to fight pro-abortion laws society is merely influencing women into accepting a patriarchal controlled position. Praveen Halappanavar took his wife’s body home to India where she was cremated and laid to rest on November 3rd 2012.