RECENTLY, The Irish Times carried on its front page the image of a little boy lighting candles for Diwali, the Indian festival of light. The next day, the lead story came with another beautiful Indian face, this time of a woman who died in an Irish hospital.
RECENTLY, The Irish Times carried on its front page the image of a little boy lighting candles for Diwali, the Indian festival of light. The next day, the lead story came with another beautiful Indian face, this time of a woman who died in an Irish hospital.
Savita Halappanavar has since become a household face and name, and a symbol of the oppression of women, whose lives and health are put at risk in Ireland’s mater- nity hospitals.
The full circumstances of Savita’s death are yet to be ascertained, but this much we know: Savita was in her 17th week of pregnancy when she presented at Galway University Hospital with severe pain in her lower back. She was sent home because the foetus’ heartbeat was sound, then returned to hospi- tal with her waters broken, and again was told the foetus’ heartbeat was still sound.
When she was still having pains, Savita, clearly aware she was miscarrying, asked for a termination – only to be refused because the foetus’ heartbeat was still detectable, and because “this is a Catholic country”, as her hus- band Praveen recalls. Her reply that she was not Catholic – not even Irish – was of little help.
Savita suffered until her foetus’ heartbeat was no more, following which Savita herself died of septicaemia.
Just a day after Diwali, Savita’s face adorned our screens and newspapers, and we held vigils and demon- strations, declaring ‘never again’ and demanding that the Government enact long- promised legislation – 20 long years after the Supreme Court ruling in the X Case – to protect the lives of birthing mothers. The question of abortion was again big news, as the ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro- choice’ camps battled it out over Savita’s dead body.
Let me nail my colours to the mast. I am in favour of women having full control over their bodies, including the choice to have an abor- tion. I am also in support of legislation in this fraught area, ensuring the life and health of mothers, not only of unborn babies. Indeed, I never saw my students so enraged as when they joined the pro-choice vigils, carry- ing placards with slogans saying ‘She had a heartbeat too’.
But something was miss- ing. No one was speaking about Savita’s migrant identi- ty. Remember when other migrant mothers became cen- tral to Ireland changing its birthright citizenship entitle- ments, because these mothers were allegedly ‘flooding’ our maternity hospitals and ‘childbearing against the state’. Like those Irish women who were locked for decades in ‘Magdalen laun- dries’, their babies sold away for adoption, migrant mother-
s’ birthing of Irish citizens became a problem, a consti- tutional ‘loophole’ that had to be plugged. Since the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, babies born in Ireland to migrant parents, though still ‘part of the nation’, are no longer automatically citizens.
My final article for 2012 is a lament, for a beautiful woman who decided to have a baby in Ireland not to gain citizenship for her child, but because she and her husband were told that Ireland is a ‘good place to have a baby’. They didn’t plan on being met with the racialising attitude of Ireland as “a Catholic country” where even if your life is ebbing away, you have no option of an abortion to save you. This is my lament and my apology for this beautiful migrant woman whose trust in Ireland ulti- mately killed her.
Ronit Lentin is associate professor of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann
