Savita: nothing in Catholic teaching prevented action to save her life.
Author: Michael Kirke
Michael Kirke was born in Co. Donegal and attended St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, 1957-1962. In 1966 he graduated from University College Dublin (History and Politics). In 1966 he began working on the editorial desk of The Evening Press in Dublin and in 1968 went to the newsroom of the Irish Press group of newspapers – contributing news and features to the group’s three titles, The Irish Press (morning paper), The Evening Press and The Sunday Press. In 1969 he went to Belfast and covered the initial unravelling of the Unionist hegemony in the province. Later that year he became the group’s education specialist. In 1973 took leave of absence to pursue postgraduate studies in education in Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1976. In 1978 he left journalism and moved into teaching. In 1981 was appointed headmaster of Rockbrook Park School in Dublin (www.rockbrook.ie). In 1994 resigned from that post and moved to live in the West of Ireland (Galway) where he began working part-time in media again. He is now back in Dublin working, among other things, as a freelance writer. His main interests are in political, cultural and educational affairs – as well as issues related to religious faith.
A bad week for human dignity and honest journalism
I’m not sure that that I needed it, but affirmation of one’s judgement from independent sources is always useful. Eilis O’Hanlon’s piece in today’s Irish Independent reaffirmed me in my judgement that I did the right thing in refusing to fund the Irish Times with my weekly subscription. We have been through a bad week for objective journalism – sorry, not objective, honest journalism. The Times is not the only medium in which my colleagues have shamed themselves but it led the charge.
The shamelessness with which the paper fostered the hysteria around the sad death of Savita Halappanavar, and used the woman and her family in promoting a cause which is accountable for the deaths of millions of children across the globe, is astounding. The complexity of the case, the sensitivity with which human decency should have suggested it be treated, were thrown to the winds.
O’Hanlon cites the submission by the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to the Oireachtas All-Party Commission on the Constitution as an example of the standards which should have applied. It said on that occasion: “There is a fundamental difference between abortion carried out with the intention of taking the life of the baby … and the unavoidable death of the baby resulting from essential treatment to protect the life of the mother.” The institute’s Clinical Practice Guide on the management of early pregnancy miscarriage, she notes, warns: “Women are sensitive about references to pregnancy loss. As their loss is not out of choice, use of words like ‘abortion’ can be sometimes offensive at a vulnerable time. Hence, discussion or documentation of management of early pregnancy loss should be worded appropriately.” O’Hanlon continues:
There was no such sensitivity shown at the Irish Times last week in its reporting on the death of 31- year-old Savita Halappanavar in a Galway hospital after contracting septicemia following a miscarriage. Instead the paper opted to present what had happened as a simple morality tale of what can happen when a woman is denied an “abortion”. Beyond the headlines there was more nuance about the range of treatments which, in practice, are offered to women in Ireland in similar circumstances, but there was no doubt that the pitch being presented by the Irish Times was one of the dangers of failing over a 20-year period to legislate for abortion in light of the X Case.
The debate for the rest of the week was coloured entirely by the Irish Times’s decision to reduce a complex personal tragedy, about which few facts were still known, to a rallying call for a new abortion law. And it wasn’t only in Ireland. The world’s media, having picked up on the tragedy, echoed the same line, deaf to the testimony of doctors that what was being called for in this case was not an abortion but a routine clinical procedure carried out on thousands of women in Ireland, and ignoring entirely the position of pro-life campaigners who made it clear that they had no moral or legal objection to Savita’s life taking precedence in these circumstances.
The Irish Times rushed to fill the vacuum left by an absence of facts with a single word, “abortion”, which was then tossed into the debate like a hand grenade into a small crowded room. In doing so, they not only sent out a message to the world that Ireland is some benighted, backward, bigoted land where religious dogma takes precedence over young women’s lives. At home they also opened the door to a vitriolic assault on pro-lifers who were suddenly being blamed for a chain of events which none of them had supported or would ever support.
There was an air of palpable nastiness in the air; the sense that a coiled spring of anger and bitterness which had been building since Clare Daly’s private member’s bill to deal with abortion was defeated in the Dail had suddenly found an outlet and could be unleashed. Pro-choice groups were now able to portray anyone who did not want to immediately legislate for more liberal abortion laws as a monster who was responsible for the death of an innocent young woman.
There was no doubt that they were upset and outraged by what had happened, but no side has a monopoly on compassion. This wasn’t a case of good vs evil, the compassionate vs the heartless, but pro-choice campaigners seemed to feel that they had a monopoly on human sympathy. They took total ownership of the story, refusing to allow anyone to even express their own sense of horror and sadness at a woman’s death unless they signed up wholesale to the pro-choice manifesto.
Everyone who dared put their head above the parapet was raked with rhetorical machine gun fire. Caroline Simons, solicitor for the pro-life movement, was measured and humane on Tonight With Vincent Browne, but her reasonableness seemed to annoy the critics more.
Senator Ronan Mullen received even more abuse when he appeared on Pat Kenny’s radio show. Fine Gael’s Michelle Mulherin, on the same programme the next day, didn’t stand a chance, having previously made an ill-advised comment about “fornication” in an unrelated context.
Anyone who tried to present any sort of argument for limiting abortion was tarred as a hardhearted dinosaur, a defender of the abstract rights of foetuses over the life of living, breathing, suffering women.
I heard recently that at a promotion event in the head office of the Irish Times, its editor – in defending the paper’s coverage of the abortion issue – said that he himself was a Catholic and that he was not pro-abortion. If that is so then the only explanation for what the record of publication shows is that the paper’s standard of honesty, fairness and integrity is being set by a clique within his organisation. This clique is clearly far more interested in achieving legislation which will facilitate the deaths of thousands of babies in their mother’s wombs than it is in providing an honest, comprehensive and balanced news and comment service to its readers. Whatever the truth of the matter is, and while this standard persists, I feel vindicated in my personal decision to cancel my subscription.
A frightening flight from truth and reason
In this morning’s array of reports and comments on the ongoing controversey about the sad death of Savita Halappanavar only one voice seemed to be crying out with any degree of sanity in the wilderness of misinformation spreading around the globe on the matter. That was Tim Stanley’s in his Daily Telegraph blog. Sitting on the fence on the question of abortion he wrote:
This post is neither for nor against legalised abortion – it’s simply about laying out the facts of a very tragic story.
On October 21, Savita Halappanavar visited Galway University Hospital, Ireland. The 31-year-old dentist was 17 weeks pregnant and suffering terrible back pain. Savita was told that she was having a miscarriage, so she requested an abortion. The doctors denied her request because they said that they detected a foetal heartbeat and that Irish law ruled out a termination. Savita’s pain continued for three days and she eventually died of septicaemia.
Inevitably, this awful story has prompted demands for a rethink of Ireland’s abortion laws. That’s understandable and will almost certainly happen. Ireland has been liberalising for decades; Irishness and Catholic conservatism are no longer as synonymous as they once were. The European Court of Human Rights 2010 ruling on abortion gives Taoiseach Enda Kenny good legal grounds for a review of the law, and Kenny has branded himself as a critic of the privileged status of Catholicism in Ireland. Change will probably come.
But some would dispute whether or not Savita’s death is an appropriate catalyst for that change. In Ireland, it actually is legal to induce a birth when a mother’s life is at risk. Eilís Mulroy notes the following:
The decision to induce labour early would be fully in compliance with the law and the current guidelines set out for doctors by the Irish Medical Council. Those guidelines allow interventions to treat women where necessary, even if that treatment indirectly results in the death to the baby. If they aren’t being followed, laws about abortion won’t change that. The issue then becomes about medical protocols being followed in hospitals and not about the absence of legal abortion in Ireland.
Because Savita’s case is under investigation, Mulroy asks questions but, wisely, avoids inferring answers: why, in this instance, did the hospital not induce (as it could and should) and is its decision not to induce reflective of a wider institutional failure?
It is possible that new legislation is necessary to clarify the existing medical consensus. But it does not logically follow that Ireland needs a total rethink of its entire approach to abortion that brings it in line with Europe’s essentially pro-choice culture. Aside from the specific medical case for abortion in Savita’s situation, inducing labour to save her life would not necessarily have conflicted with Catholic moral teaching, either. In 1951, Pope Pius XII explicitly ruled that such a procedure “can be lawful.” If it is true, as the Halappanavar family claims, that the Galway doctors said they would not provide a termination because “this is a Catholic country”, then they got their theology unforgivably wrong.
Savita Halappanavar’s death demands investigation and answers. Aside from giving justice to her family, the implications of any investigation for the wider abortion debate are so wide-ranging that it is crucial that we get the facts unbiased and 100 per cent accurate. Alas, such objectivity is not always applied when it comes to media reporting of the Irish and/or Catholic approach to abortion. Indeed, much of it is misleading and unhelpful.
What is frightening about all this is the flight from reason and truth. Many of the facts surrounding the case are not at all clear but one is clear and that is that this is not about abortion at all. It is about medical practice in a particular Irish hospital and whether or not the medical team involved in this case did everything they could do to save this woman’s life which they were obliged to do by law and the ethics of their profession. Is no one interested in the truth anymore – either in Ireland and across the globe?
“Unseemly rush to judgment”
The unseemly – to put it mildly – opportunism of the pro-choice campaigners in Ireland and further afield is deeply disturbing in both its callousness and deceitfulness with regard to the tragic death of the young Indian woman, Savita Halappanavar, who died in a Galway hospital from the side-effects of a miscarriage earlier this month.
The pro-choice campaign – ably assisted by a swathe of national and international media, as pointed out by David Quinn in today’s Irish Independent – has not only rushed to judgemnt on what really happened in this case but has totally misrepresented the Irish law on abortion in dealing with the matter. They simply see this as a cause célèbre which they are going to make the most of to try to represent Irish law prohibiting abortion as a medieval and barbaric relic. Truth is once again being sacrificed on the altar of their relentless campaign to force the Irish Government to legislate for abortion.
The spin being put on the story from the time it first broke is that Savita Halappanavar died because she was denied an abortion. The truth is that this is not why she died.
As David Quinn points out:
We know this because if there was a need to end her pregnancy in order to save her life, then the hospital was free to do that. Nothing in law was preventing the hospital from doing so.
And to be absolutely clear, ending a woman’s pregnancy prematurely is not necessarily the same thing as abortion.
For example, inducing labour where it is necessary to save the life of the mother is not the same as abortion and Irish hospitals induce labour in these circumstances on a regular basis.
From the available facts, we know that Mrs Halappanavar was miscarrying and that she died within days of being admitted to hospital from septicemia and E Coli ESBL.
We do not know for certain whether ending the pregnancy upon her arrival in the hospital would have saved her life, but to repeat, if medical staff needed to do that they could have done it.
Therefore the ‘woman dies because she was denied abortion’ storyline is simply not true. The ‘woman dies because of Catholic opposition to abortion’ is also not true.
We simply do not know for certain at this stage whether Mrs Halappanavar would have died no matter what was done. This is what the investigation into her death will ascertain.
And we must also repeat for the umpteenth time that Ireland has one of the lowest maternal death rates in the world. It is lower than the British rate where abortion is available on demand.
In addition, it is necessary to remind ourselves that sometimes women die because of botched abortions in legal settings. Indeed, last year a doctor – Phanuel Dartey – was struck off in Britain because he nearly killed an Irish woman while performing an abortion on her in a Marie Stopes Clinic in the UK.
This story received remarkably little publicity here in Ireland. RTE did not cover it at all, whereas it has given the Savita Halappanavar story wall-to-wall coverage. Why this discrepancy?
And by what journalistic calculus did RTE decide to give so little coverage to the revelation by this newspaper that some staff at pregnancy crisis agencies in Ireland are giving women dangerous and illegal advice? It would be good to know.
There has been a tremendous and unseemly rush to judgment in this case.
In the same paper an opinion piece by Eílís Mulroy, one of Ireland’s leading pro-life advocates, quotes the comments of Professor John Bonnar, one of Ireland’s leading gynaecologists, to a parliamentary committee some years ago explaining that “In current obstetrical practice, rare complications can arise where therapeutic intervention is required at a stage in pregnancy when there will be little or no prospect for the survival of the baby, due to extreme immaturity.
“In these exceptional situations failure to intervene may result in the death of both the mother and baby. We consider that there is a fundamental difference between abortion carried out with the intention of taking the life of the baby, for example for social reasons, and the unavoidable death of the baby resulting from essential treatment to protect the life of the mother.”
It is clear that currently accepted ethical standards of medical practice in Ireland, if applied to this case, could not have been the cause of this sad death. Something else was wrong here and we will have to await the results of the investigations now being carried out to find what precisely that was.
All treatment necessary to save her life should have been given
Following the tragic news today about the recent death of Savida Halappanavar, a native of India living with her husband here in Ireland, the media agency Catholic Comment, issued a statement clarifying that nothing in Catholic teaching on abortion stood in the way of giving Savida all and every treatment necessary to save her life. The statement said:
The death of Savida Halappanavar is a tragic loss and our sympathy goes to her husband and family. While we don’t know the full facts of the cause of death, it is clear that under current medical practice in Ireland, she should not have been denied treatment necessary to save her life. This is in line with ethical standards, including from a Catholic perspective. She should not have been told she could not receive necessary medical treatment because “this is a Catholic country.”
In 2000, Professor John Bonnar, then chairman of Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which represents 90%-95% of Ireland’s obstetricians and gynaecologists, explained the situation to the All Party Oireachtas Committee’s Fifth Report on Abortion as follows:
‘In current obstetrical practice rare complications can arise where therapeutic intervention is required at a stage in pregnancy when there will be little or no prospect for the survival of the baby, due to extreme immaturity. In these exceptional situations failure to intervene may result in the death of both the mother and baby. We consider that there is a fundamental difference between abortion carried out with the intention of taking the life of the baby, for example for social reasons, and the unavoidable death of the baby resulting from essential treatment to protect the life of the mother.’
In other words, for the hospital to have induced labour with the intention of saving Savita would have been in accord both with Irish law, normal Irish medical practice, and with Catholic teaching. In a recent article in the Irish Times, Bishop John Fleming stated that “…if the life of the mother is threatened, by illness or some other medical condition, the care provided by medical professionals will make sure that she receives all the medical care needed.”
We hope that the investigations being carrying out will show if and why this did not happen in this case.
Petra Conroy is Catholic Comment’s coordinator and can be contacted here . Full details about Catholic Comment are here.
Will the European Parliament cave-in to intolerance again?
Dr. Tonio Borg
Do you remember the notorious case of Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian Christian Democrat politician and academic whose nomination for a post as a European Commissioner was rejected by the European Parliament because of his Roman Catholic views on homosexuality? This was done despite his assurances that these were only his personal convictions and would not dictate his administration. Did you think that was a once-off event? If you did, you were wrong. Here we go again.
Dr. Tonio Borg, currently Malta’s Foreign Minister, is his country’s nominee for the European Commission’s Health and Consumer Policy portfolio, a post recently vacated by John Dalli. Borg’s academic qualifications are in administrative and human rights law and he has decades of experience in his country’s Justice and Home Affairs Ministries.
But Dr. Borg is also a Catholic and, because of this, a coordinated campaign opposing his nomination is in full force. For weeks, a coalition of special interest groups and NGOs has been mounting an aggressive negative campaign against Dr. Borg.
Déjà vu?
On 13 November, the Commissioner-designate will representatives of the European Parliament (which has a quasi veto on the confirmations of new Commissioners). Under normal circumstances, there would be no reason for Parliament to doubt the nominee’s suitability for the post. But this is liberal Europe – and they do things differently there.
In articles, blog-posts and tweets, European Dignity Watch reports,
….his critics— first and foremost the European Humanist Federation, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA)—have focused their attacks on Dr. Borg’s Christian faith and his personal views on issues like abortion, same-sex ‘marriage’ and divorce.
None of these fall under EU competence or have anything to do with the portfolio Dr. Borg would inherit if confirmed. And yet, his opponents, disrespectful of the principle of subsidiarity enshrined in the EU treaties, claim that these are not ‘European values’. They even go as far as to assert that he has ‘extremist values’.
In other words, according to these vocal lobby groups, simply holding Christian beliefs on social issues is a sign of ‘extremism’.
If Dr. Borg’s appointment is rejected it will clearly be done in contravention of Annex XVII of the European Parliament’s own Rules of Procedure, which stipulates that European commissioners are to be designated solely on the basis of their competence and knowledge of their prospective portfolio. Dr. Borg’s personal beliefs thus should not and cannot be used to evaluate his suitability for the post.
The dangerous arrogance of victors
Is there not something terribly arrogant about this?
“There is no doubt about the fact that the president reflects this country,” David Axelrod, Mr Obama’s senior strategist said. “He put together a broad coalition that reflected the country. At the end of the day, elections are not just about metrics; they’re about people.”
Obama, his campaign and his philosophy is supported by a little over half of the voting electorate of the United States. Yet he is now described as the mirror of his nation. That sounds dangerously totalitarian to me. Éamon de Valera, one of the dominant political figures in twentieth-century Ireland reputedly once said that he could look into his heart and know what the will of the Irish people was. Recollection of this is generally accompanied with a bout of laughter.
But in Obama’s case it is no laughing matter. It is a forewarning of a political campaign of marginalization of 50 percent of the people of the United States. If Obama and his administration proceed to govern on the basis of this “vision” of itself then it could be taken as nothing short of a declaration of a cold civil war – a war he had already started in his first term with policies which trample on the religious freedom of many of the citizens of the US.
American independence from the British Empire came about when the Mother of Parliaments chose to ignore the legitimate rights and liberties of its loyal subjects in the 13 colonies. After about ten years of struggle to find a way of living freely and peacefully within what they considered their true skin as people of the wider British community, these loyal subjects saw that they could no longer abide the suppression of their rights. Consequently they rose – very reluctantly – in bloody rebellion and won their rights back.
Mr Axelrod said the Republican party “has some soul-searching to do”. On the contrary, it is Mr. Axelrod, Mr. Obama and the Democratic which has to look into its soul and nip in the bud, the totalitarian seed which they will find there.
Exit polls, we are told, showed 56 per cent of self-described moderates voted for Mr Obama; only 41 per cent for Mr Romney. I don’t know what these “metrics” are meant to tell us. They are certainly not telling us very much about people. Every dictator who ever existed thought of himself as a moderate.
Obama – the anti-American’s American?
Everyone is now aware that if the rest of the Western world’s electorates had votes in Tuesday’s US election, Barack Obama would be shoe-in. Why? Because that world is still anti-American and it is myth-making to say that Obama has changed that.
Charles Moore, in today’s Daily Telegraph, gives us a very interesting reading of the two opposing cultures represented in next week’s American election. In it he observes how badly a myopic and delusional European media establishment has misread it all in their fascination and adulation of the Obama presidency of the past four years. They do not see that Mr. Obama is not in fact what he appears to be.
In Britain and, even more, in continental Europe, the people who bring their fellow citizens the news do not really see this. To them, Mr Obama’s combination of historically persecuted ethnicity and posh seminar tone is just perfect. It satisfies their mildly Left-wing consciences and fits in with their cultural assumptions. The chief of these is that the excesses of the West, especially of America, are the biggest problem in the world. Mr Obama comes as near to saying this as anyone trying to win American votes ever could. His “apology tour” to the Middle East early in his presidency remains, for the European elites, the best thing he has ever done. He is the anti-Americans’ American.
Mitt Romney is not. Although he is a moderate Republican, it is fascinating how profoundly he clashes culturally with Obama, and, a fortiori, with the European media and political classes.
Read more here.
The first casualty in war, and in elections?
This is one we really need a “fact check” on: like the facts that make up the definition of what a practising Catholic is. This is eligible for the classic example of the half-truth – or even .099 of the truth: In a campaign video released this week, Vice President Joe Biden claims that President Obama shares his belief in the social teachings of the Catholic Church. We have no doubt about that. What is in doubt is the correspondence between what the VP believes and the social teaching of the Catholic Church – or any of its other teachings for that matter.
For the video on YouTube go to LifeSite News here.
Questions to answer?
The Irish Times reported today that the country’s Minister for Health James Reilly has again been taken to task by the Ceann Comhairle (Speaker in the Irish parliament) for failing to answer a Dáil question about primary care centres.
But in the light of the revelations in one of the country’s newspapers last week perhaps he has even more serious questions to answer – like the question of the position of the new CEO, Dr. Tony O’Brien, whom he has appointed to the Health Service Executive?
Sam Coulter Smith, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Royal College of Surgeons, was quoted las Saturday as saying that he was “shocked and very disappointed” to learn that Irish women who travel to Britain for abortions are being told they should hide this from their doctors. This advice was given to them by agents of the Irish Family Planning Association
Dr. O’Brien, the new HSE chief, was Chief Executive of the Irish Family Planning Association from December 1991 to August 2002. He was also Chief Executive of the UK Family Planning Association from May 1995 to April 1996, an organisation which is even more suspect that its Irish equivalent, when it comes to cavalier approaches to women’s and children’s health.
Was advice like this being given to women under Dr. O’Brien’s watch at the IFPA?
In the light of last week’s revelations there has now been a call by members of the Oireachtas (parliamentary) Committee on Health and Children for an independent review of counselling practices at IFPA and HSE crisis pregnancy counselling clinics. The Irish Pro Life Campaign has welcomed the call.
Perhaps the country’s “paper of record”, the Irish Times, will now no longer be able to ignore this 5-day-old story if it is forced on to the records of the Oireachtas.
Reported in today’s Irish Independent, Fine Gael TD Jerry Buttimer, Chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children, said he would be contacting the HSE as a matter of urgency to “seek clarification on the nature, independence and partiality of their inquiry”.
His concerns were echoed by other members of the Committee including TDs Regina Doherty, Denis Naughton, Mary Mitchell O’Connor, Robert Troy, Mattie McGrath and Senator John Crown.
Dr Ruth Cullen of the Pro Life Campaign said: “We welcome the fact that the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children are treating the findings of the undercover investigation with the seriousness they deserve. It is vital that an independent review takes place without delay. These findings transcend the abortion debate. The type of counselling shown by the undercover investigation to take place at IFPA and HSE pregnancy counselling clinics quite literally puts women’s lives at risk.
She continued “We are calling for an independent public inquiry into how such professional malpractice has been allowed to go unnoticed and uncorrected by the body legally tasked with monitoring them. Since the Health Service Executive (HSE) are themselves implicated in the failure of proper governance of the crisis pregnancy agencies, they are part of the problem and cannot be allowed to supervise the investigation.”
“The reality is that the Irish taxpayer is subsidising counsellors to give unsafe information to women. This must be investigated promptly and thoroughly” Dr. Cullen concluded.
See link to today’s Irish Independent report – HSE chiefs face grilling over illegal advice on abortion. See link to reports from last Saturday’s Irish Independent Shocking breach of good medical practice says Rotunda Chief and Revealed – The Abortion advice that could put lives at risk
Garvan Hill 