The Message: The Eighth Amendment Is An Insult To Women

The draft report into the death of Savita Halappanavar was published by the HSE last week. As almost everyone in Ireland knows by now, Savita was 17 weeks pregnant when she was admitted to University Hospital Galway, suffering from back pain.

Tests showed that her white blood cell count was high, an indication that she was fighting an infection. They also revealed that she was having a miscarriage and that the foetus was unviable.
The inquest into Savita’s death began this week, under the glare of intense media scrutiny. Praveen Halappanavar, through his solicitor Gerard O’Donnell, has already expressed his unhappiness with the HSE’s report. He is also deeply concerned that only 16 witnesses have been called to appear at the inquest. Nonetheless, he is determined to find out why his wife was allowed to die, so unnecessarily.
According to Praveen’s acccount, on day one of the inquest, when he and his wife were informed that the foetus had no chance of survival, they requested an abortion. To anyone not hogtied by Catholic dogma, it was the obvious course of action. The baby would never be born alive. The best way to address Savita’s illness was to free her body of the burden of the sadly doomed foetus that was putting her at risk.
In India, Savita’s place of birth, the procedure would have been carried out immediately. According to Praveen, the couple made the request on three occasions, though this assertion will apparently be disputed by the consultant obstetrician Dr. Kathleen Astbury. The request was noted only once in the hospital records. However, the reiabiity of those records has been called into question, Praveen Halappanavar stating that “retrospective entries” were made in the medical notes.
The story is a horribly traumatic one, but to understand it properly we need to think carefully again about Savita’s death. The option of abortion was considered but Dr. Astbury decided not to proceed with a termination because, she claims, Savita’s life was “not under threat.” Praveen says that the doctor refused an abortion on the basis that “Ireland is a Catholic country.” As long as the foetal heartbeat was present, there could be no evacuation of the uterus. Dr.Astbury denies that she said that Ireland was a Catholic country.
According to Praveen, both husband and wife protested that Savita was neither Irish nor Catholic – to no avail. Meanwhile, in another shocking twist, she had been prescribed antibiotics that were no stronger than would have been deemed appropriate for a baby: they were no use in fighting an infection of the kind that had started to colonise Savita’s embattled system. The report makes harrowing reading, as the details of the progress of the infection are recorded, against a backdrop of wide-ranging medical incompetence.
Reading it you want to roar: “How in the name of Christ are you letting this happen to a very sick woman?” If this is what the ordinary reader thinks, with no immediate personal knowledge of the people involved, then how must Praveen Halappanavar feel? His solicitor Gerard O’Donnell has already answered that. Savita’s grieving husband wants to ask Professor Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, who headed the HSE enquiry: “Why did no one jump up and down and scream, ‘If someone doesn’t do something here, this woman is going to die’?”
The answer may be a very simple one: that the culture of Roman Catholic ‘ethics’ is too deeply ingrained in Irish medicine for people to be relied on to do the right thing where abortion is concerned.
In the end, Savita Halappanavar died of septic shock. The draft report says that there was an “over-emphasis on the need not to intervene until the foetal heartbeat stopped, together with an under-emphasis on the need to focus an appropriate attention on monitoring for and managing the risk of infection and sepsis in the mother.”
That, my friends, is putting it mildly.
Without pre-empting the findings of the inquest, on the basis of what we have heard to date, Savita Halappanavar was a victim of the 1983 amendment to the constitution, which reads: “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

That amendment was an attempt on the part of a moralistic, right-wing Catholic pressure group to create a permanent constitutional bar on abortion. Historically, the position of the Catholic church had been that abortion was impermissible in all circumstances including where the mother’s life might be at risk – and countless women died as a result, in many cases their foetuses with them.
By the ’70s, the disgraceful misogyny of this position was no longer sustainable. As women began to take control of their own fertility the movement to de-stigmatise abortion gathered momentum. In Ireland, as a pre-emptive strike, anti-choice activists dreamed up the absurdities of the 1983 amendment.
There simply cannot be, and there is not, an “equal” right to life between a woman in distress with a pregnancy, which is putting her health at risk, and a foetus which is entirely dependent on that mother for its life. The gift of life to any future child is always entirely at the mother’s discretion. This may not sit well with a creationist view of the world. In a strict philosophical sense, however, it is irrefutable. If a woman feels that she is not capable of carrying through a pregnancy, and if no other choice is available to her, then she retains the absolute right to end her own life, thus ending the life of the foetus. It may not always be acknowledged by the official statistics, but many women have made that decision, including in Ireland.
And so – while it is the prerogative of any woman to reverse this by refusing treatment, for example for cancer, thus giving priority to the foetus – the inescapable, unshakable truth is that at the most fundamental level, the life of the foetus is completely subordinate to the life and health of the woman who is
supporting it.
Out of a combination of cowardice and cynicism, our politicians bought into this self-deluding fiction in 1983 and we have been forced to live with the consequences ever since.
The death of Savita Halappanavar was a horrifying tragedy. It was one that could have been avoided. And it happened because of the dominance in Irish hospitals of the Catholic dogma that puts an obsessive emphasis on not allowing, or not acknowledging, abortion ahead of every other consideration, including the health and the lives of women in general and of prospective mothers in particular.
In making the spurious claim of an equal right to life for the “unborn”, the eighth amendment to the Constitution is a gross insult to women. The correct next step for the Government would be to remove it from the Constitution. In the meantime, our thoughts are with Praveen Salappanaver – and the extraordinary courage he has shown in the face of the most appalling adversity. We
salute you...