There are some news stories that are so horrific no amount of flowery rhetoric can add to a writer’s argument, the bare details alone suffice.
On Sunday 21st October Savita Halappanavar, seventeen weeks pregnant with her first child, was taken to Galway University Hospital after complaining of intense back pain. Consultants confirmed to Savita that she was miscarrying but refused to medically intervene on the grounds that a fetal heartbeat could be traced, at one point telling her that a termination would not be possible because Ireland “is a Catholic country”.
On Wednesday 24th October the fetal heartbeat stopped and the fetus was removed, though by this point Savita was seriously ill, having contracted septicaemia and E coli. She was moved to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where she died on Sunday 28th October.
However the news of Savita’s untimely was not made public until Wednesday 14th of November, when the Irish Times made it its front page story. Public outcry was almost instant, with protests held outside the Irish parliament, and even the Irish embassy in London, on the same day. On Saturday 17th of November a large march was held in Dublin, which organisers claim attracted around 20,000 people, and hundreds of vigils were held in towns and cities around the country. There were also demonstrations in Savita’s native India.
The angry response of the Irish public to Savita’s death highlights one of the most ridiculous aspects of Irish abortion law: its unpopularity with a great majority of Irish citizens. Opinion polls have consistently shown that only a small minority oppose abortion in all cases, most recently a poll conducted by the Sunday Times in September of this year, which suggested the number was as low as 16%. In contrast the same poll suggested that 80% of those polled were in favour of legal access to abortion in cases where a woman’s life may be at risk; in other words, in cases like Savita’s.
Indeed, the more one looks at the hard-line stance against abortion of the Irish political class, particularly Fine Gael and Fine Fail, the less sense it makes – if it made any to begin with. We might imagine, for example, that the criminalisation of abortion is simply a relic of a distant past that successive politicians have not had the courage to confront, and whilst in some ways this is true, abortion was only made constitutionally illegal in 1983. Further, it might be tempting to reduce this to the continuing dominance of Catholicism in Ireland, but then we must ask why other Catholic countries, Italy for example, have much more progressive attitudes to abortion rights.
One also wonders about the logic of a law that is essentially self-defeating; an amendment to the law that outlaws abortion made it legal for Irish women to travel abroad for to terminate their pregnancy, and a recent statistic from the Department of Health shows that some 12 women a day do so. The Irish government are no doubt aware of these figures, and of the financial, emotional and physical burden this places on the women forced to make this decision, and yet stand resolute in their opposition to reform.
It is also important not to focus too greatly on the political sphere, and Irish “pro-lifers” understand this. Abortion was not legalised in Britain simply because progressive politicians were elected, but because of decades of often ignored – and now largely forgotten – campaigning on the part of feminists, progressive doctors, intellectuals and socialists, creating a climate that allowed questions of sexuality, women’s rights and bodily autonomy to be addressed. Irish “pro-lifers”, though a minority, understand the importance of unrelenting campaigning in shaping public discourse and closing down debate.
Savita’s death has reminded the Irish population that the debate over abortion is too important to be closed down by an extreme minority, highlighting the absurdity of a law that allows healthy young women to die in the name of “protecting life”.
By Benjamin Conway