This week The Thirsty Gargoyle’s blog turned its attention to the utterly despicable manipulation of public opinion in which the sad case of Savita Halappanavar has become mired. Not having got the verdict they wanted from the inquest into her death the abortion campaigners – ably abetted by a national and international media which long ago made up their minds that she died because a hospital refused to abort her baby – they are by-passing the verdict and spinning out the very peculiar evidence given by a pro-abortion doctor.
The Gargoyle writes:
It’s astonishing to look at the reaction of so many people in Ireland to the recent inquest into the death last October of Savita Halappanavar in Galway, and in particular at how so much attention is being paid to Dr Peter Boylan, erstwhile master of the National Maternity Hospital, that the inquest seems to be being rewritten in the popular mind.
Everyone seems aware of what Dr Boylan said at the inquest, but in directing the jury towards its verdict, the coroner didn’t so much as acknowledge Boylan’s claim that Savita would have survived if the law permitted doctors to terminate pregnancy in order to pre-empt hypothetical risks rather than real ones.
The jury could, of course, have disregarded the coroner’s advice and given a narrative verdict which would have given due weight to Dr Boylan’s belief that the law was the problem. Instead it opted for a verdict of medical misadventure, accepting the coroner’s recommendations, the emphasis of which was almost wholly on procedures and systems failures, with the sole reference to terminations being a recommendation that the Medical Board and An Bord Altranais should have a common, clear, and explicit set of guidelines for how situations such as Savita’s should be handled. It looks, in truth, as though the inquest implicitly rejected Boylan’s analysis.
The official response from Galway University Hospital seems to recognise this, with lots of browbeating about systems failures and not a word said about the law putting Galway’s staff in an impossible position.
If the inquest implicitly rejected Boylan’s analysis, Savita’s widower Praveen seems to have gone rather further, going so far as to cast aspersions on Boylan’s integrity.
Read the rest of The Thirsty Gargoyle’s dissection – with access to all the relevant links – of this shameless and sinister plot to subvert Ireland’s Constitution.
Garvan Hill 