Savita Halappanavar Research Articles

The Ghost of Savita Halappanavar Comes to America.

The 2012 death in Ireland of Savita Halappanavar from an inappropriately managed spontaneous abortion may be a harbinger of what now awaits pregnant Americans.

Gendered Silence and Misdiagnosis in the Clinical Encounter: Celia de Fréine's Blood Debts and the Hepatitis C Scandal in Ireland

Gendered Silence and Misdiagnosis in the Clinical Encounter:Celia de Fréine's Blood Debts and the Hepatitis C Scandal in Ireland* Luz Mar González-Arias (bio) … a blood disorder is a whole body issue.Unanchored, migrant—blood is its own diaspora. sinÉad gleeson, constellations (37) The history of women's health care is characterized by silenced or heavily edited episodes that have contributed to the neglect of women's bodies and minds and accordingly prevented them from receiving the best possible treatments. As Hannah Devlin has contended, this prevailing attitude toward women's health has triggered "a string of health-care scandals over several decades" in which the voices of the patients have been consistently ignored. Ireland is no exception in this respect, and its history, both past and present, is punctuated by the silencing of women's voices and bodies in the clinical encounter. The death of Savita Halappanavar in October 2012 at Galway University Hospital—where, in spite of her physical distress and severe complications in the midst of a miscarriage, she was refused a termination of her pregnancy because there was still a fetal heartbeat—stands out among the recent failures of the Irish medical, religious, and political systems with respect to women, and it has left an indelible impact on the campaigns for reproductive justice in the [End Page 264] country (Holland). The CervicalCheck cancer controversy, which first emerged in 2018 and involved scores of women who received incorrect smear-test results; the brutal procedure of symphysiotomy, performed as an alternative to caesarean sections; and the hepatitis C scandal that will be the focus of this essay have also become paradigmatic examples of obstetric violence and gender imbalances in the medical history of Ireland. Celia de Fréine's collection Blood Debts, originally published in Irish as Fiacha Fola in 2004,1 and rendered into English by the author herself in 2014, is to date the only poetic articulation of the so-called hepatitis C scandal (also known as the Anti-D scandal) in Ireland. In the late 1970s about 1,600 Irish citizens, most of them women, were infected with a contaminated blood product: Anti-D immunoglobulin, also known as the Anti-D agent. The product was given to women with rhesus-negative blood who had given birth to rhesuspositive babies in order to prevent damage to the fetus in any subsequent pregnancies. This blood product was revolutionary in the prevention of rhesus disease, but it proved disastrous for the patients who received a batch manufactured in 1976 by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) from a donor who had infective hepatitis. A number of women were diagnosed with lupus, jaundice, fatigue, and a rash, but no connection between their illnesses and the toxic agent was initially established. The scandal, which has been referred to as "Ireland's greatest medical disaster" (Keane), was made public only in 1994 when evidence was provided that the BTSB had been alerted to the possibility of contamination yet had ignored the warning.2 De Fréine is "an inhabitant of liminal spaces" (Palacios-González and González-Arias 103), and her "creative force is to be found in the rich terrain between languages, genres, geographies, and literary [End Page 265] traditions" (González-Arias, "Afterword" 102). Although mainly known as a poet, she has also published numerous essays, worked successfully in opera and filmmaking, and published and produced numerous plays. Originally from Northern Ireland, she now divides her time between Dublin and Connemara; she has been inspired and influenced by English, Irish, French, and Eastern European literary traditions; she translates her own work from Irish into English, and most of her collections have appeared in dual-language format. De Fréine is a poet who upsets traditional boundaries, a characteristic that not only flavors the formal aspects of her work but also leaves its mark on the varied themes she has worked on, the volatile relationship between health and gender featuring prominently among them. In several of her collections, for instance, de Fréine has explored posttraumatic stress disorder and the demonstrations of extreme violence against women on the part of soldiers that...

The relation and function of discourses: a corpus-cognitive analysis of the Irish abortion debate

Collocation analysis has proved useful in identifying discourses in media texts about people, events and situations. While corpus methods can tell us about the existence and frequency of discourses, they are unable to give insight into the function they play in a text. I argue that we can illuminate how discourses are conceptualised and used argumentatively in relation to other discourses by drawing on cognitive linguistics. Such discourse relations form the basis of ideologies and argumentative viewpoints. In this paper, I use a corpus–cognitive approach, employing collocational analysis and the ‘trajector/landmark’ alignment from Cognitive Grammar ( Langacker, 1987 , 1991 , 2008 ) to analyse the discourses of the concept words mother, woman and church in the Irish debate on abortion access after the death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012. This reveals relational and functional differences between the discourses of these three words (e.g., the discourses voiced about a mother differ when texts also concern the Church). I argue that the use of a corpus–cognitive approach reflects language in use and allows us to see how related discourses function to create ideological viewpoints.

The Irish Healthcare System: A Morality Tale.

A country's healthcare system-the protection and healing of some its weakest people, its sick and injured-could be considered to be one of the most definitive expressions of its national morality. In recent decades, Ireland has experienced profound cultural changes; from a mostly monocultural and religious society to a multi-ethnic one, where secular ideas predominate. Economically, it is largely neoliberal, with one of the world's most open economies, and one of its lowest corporate tax rates; though there is also a welfare state. Its healthcare system has reflected these cultural changes. The system has evolved, gradually, from being run almost exclusively by religious groups, to becoming essentially secular in nature (though religious groups are still involved at the ownership level). Overall, the system is run according to the two competing secular ideologies which currently predominate; it is a two-tier system, with a mix of a neoliberally oriented (though government subsidized) private system, and a public system. The latter has been starved of resources in recent decades; so to achieve good, or at times adequate healthcare, it is almost essential to have private health insurance (which about half of the population have).This two-tier system has led to significant concerns and occasional scandals; for example, patients dying while on waiting lists for public treatment, who could have been treated and possibly saved if they had health insurance. A purely ethical approach to healthcare-with the aim of healing the sick-has been mixed with competing motives, such as the desire for profit in the private sector, or for short term savings and box-ticking in the public system. Thus, good healthcare practice and best moral practice are being undermined by competing agendas.In this article, I describe and reflect ethically on the Irish healthcare system, and how it has evolved to its current state. I also discuss how dysfunction in the healthcare system, leading to the death of a pregnant woman, Savita Halappanavar, was a major factor in a constitutional ban on abortion being overturned.

Mediating abortion politics in Ireland: media framing of the death of Savita Halappanavar

ABSTRACTOn 28 October 2012, Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman living in Ireland, died in hospital while under medical care for a miscarrying pregnancy. According to her husband, her repeated requests for an abortion were ignored because of the presence of a foetal heartbeat. Ms Halappanavar’s death was a critical event in the process leading to a referendum on 25 May 2018, when the Irish electorate voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, removing the constitutional ban on abortion. The name Savita has become indelibly linked to the changing course of abortion politics, so it is timely to reassess the role of the media in shaping the parameters of the debate about the impact of her death on the issue. This study presents a frame analysis of Irish newspapers in the weeks following her death, mapping the political, medical, legal and socio-ethical discourses, as well as the related contemporaneous events that set the agenda for the type of debate that was to follow. It identifies four media frames: Public Tragedy, Political Opportunity, Abortion Legacy and Maternal Health. Our central argument is that the overall effect of media framing provided much face-saving for politicians in the way that the legislative issue was viewed through a conservative party-political lens, despite public outrage.

A 'Medical Misadventure' in Ireland: Deaths of Savita & Prasa Halappanavar, University Hospital, Galway, Ireland, 21-28 October, 2012

Savita Halappanavar was a 31 year old woman who was 17 weeks pregnant when she presented at the University Hospital, Galway, on 21 October, 2013, with a miscarriage. She spontaneously delivered a stillborn daughter, Prasa, on the afternoon of 24 October, and died from sepsis early on 28 October.The circumstances of her death generated a hurricane of controversy in Ireland and around the world about Irish abortion law. A coroner's inquest held in Galway in April, 2013 resulted in the classification of Savita's death as a medical misadventure.What follows is a chronological account of Savita's care and treatment from 21 to 28 October, drawn from newspaper reports of the evidence taken at the inquest. The accuracy of this narrative depends upon the accuracy of the cited reports. Readers concerned about particular aspects of the case should supplement and check this account against other sources, and those requiringespecially detailed information should consult primary sources for the evidence taken during the inquest.

The Legal and Factual Status of Abortion in Australia

The issue of abortion was propelled into the global spotlight in October 2012 when Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist who was 17-weeks pregnant, sought treatment at Ireland's University Hospital Galway. Despite the fact that she was having a miscarriage and the foetus had no chance of survival, the hospital refused to terminate the pregnancy while a foetal heartbeat remained. When the abortion was eventually performed, days after she presented to the hospital, it was too late for Savita; she had contracted septicaemia and died as a result. This tragedy demonstrates that in the year 2012, it was possible for a woman to walk into a first world hospital, in western Europe no less, and be denied a potentially life-saving abortion. So what is the situation in Australia? Could such a tragedy happen in our own backyard? This article explores the availability and legality of abortion in Australia.

Humanism and “The Priest in Politics”: Sean O’Faolain, Edward Said and John Henry Newman

Since the foundation of the Irish and particularly since the writing of de Valera's 1937 constitution, the desire for the separation of Church and has been a central concern for many of the country's more prominent intellectuals. (1) Chief among these was Sean O'Faolain. In his address at the May 1991 memorial service held for O'Faolain, Conor Cruise O'Brien, himself a notable critic of what he called State, (2) offered a nuanced picture: Sean was often referred to as anti-clerical, but that is a misleading description. Sean was incapable of humping together so disparate a body as the Irish clergy, whether for the purposes of condemnation or commendation. What Sean was against was what Burke was against: abuse of power, whether by Right or Left, Catholics or Protestants, laity or clergy. In Sean's day, the senior Irish clergy commanded a great deal of authority, even in what are thought of elsewhere as purely secular affairs and they sometimes abused that authority (1991: 95). In paper I wish to examine how O'Faolain contested the abuse of power of the Church while doing so with a view to stressing, in line with the subtle intellectual politics not of Burke but of Edward Said, the important role to be played by the individual intellectual in bringing about change, and the potential value of the utilization of a renewed language of humanism. By revisiting O'Faolain, and by invoking his presence in dialogue with Said's humanistic idiom, we can reappraise the worth of his ground-breaking challenge to Church authority and consider it particularly in relation to ongoing tension in Ireland around Church and relations and the consequent fallout with regards to individual and gender rights. To illustrate the character of O'Faolain's interventions, a close reading, in the manner advocated by Said, will be undertaken of his article Priest in Politics which was published in 1947 in The Bell, that key magazine often attributed with offering the first important challenge to the terms of national self-definition which had become hegemonic in the decades following independence. (3) Following the above quotation, O'Brien went on to claim that it was in fact his own cousin, Owen Sheehy Skeffington, who had been the most aggressive in critiquing the abuses of clerical power before then recalling how O'Faolain himself had ended his memorial address at Skeffington's funeral declaring: won, Owen, you won (1991: 96). The words had been articulated in 1970 in relation to the broad mood of liberalisation which had marked the 60s and the perception that the Catholic State had, in effect, fallen to the secular tide of modernisation, part of which involved the increasing acknowledgement of a humanist charter of rights and liberties not modelled to the exclusive prerogative of the Church. In the light of the recent controversy in Ireland following the death from septicaemia of Ms Savita Halappanavar, and the subsequent claim from her husband that, according to The Irish Times, she had repeatedly asked for a termination of her pregnancy over a three-day period but was refused as there was still a foetal heartbeat, while also being told this is a country, the celebratory words of O'Faolain do perhaps appear somewhat premature (Holland and Cullen 2012). Indeed, O'Brien himself had been notably less sanguine than O'Faolain, remarking that following the results of the two referenda held in the 1980s, the words of victory would have to be spoken without the same confidence, while still concluding that Yet basically, Sean was right (1991: 96). If the degree to which Ireland has moved away from a identity remains as issue of debate, it is unquestionably true that the change has been considerable since the mid-century period, and it is equally important that, particularly in view of the contemporary controversy, attention be placed once more on the seminal role played in promoting change by individual intellectuals who, in the parlance of humanism and the language of human rights, 'speak truth to power'. …

Termination of pregnancy as emergency obstetric care: the interpretation of Catholic health policy and the consequences for pregnant women: An analysis of the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland and similar cases

Issues arising from the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland in October 2012 include the question of whether it is unethical to refuse to terminate a non-viable pregnancy when the woman’s life may be at risk. In Catholic maternity services, this decision intersects with health professionals’ interpretation of Catholic health policy on treatment of miscarriage as well as the law on abortion. This paper explores how these issues came together around Savita’s death and the consequences for pregnant women and maternity services worldwide. It discusses cases not only in Ireland but also the Americas. Many of the events presented are recent, and most of the sources are media and individual reports. However, there is a very worrying common thread across countries and continents. If further research unearths more cases like Savita’s, any Catholic health professionals and/or hospitals refusing to terminate a pregnancy as emergency obstetric care should be stripped of their right to provide maternity services. In some countries these are the main or only existing maternity services. Even so, governments should refuse to fund these services, and either replace them with non-religious services or require that non-religious staff are available at all times specifically to take charge of such cases to prevent unnecessary deaths. At issue is whether a woman’s life comes first or not at all.

The quest for an ethnic identifier in Ireland

The tragic death of Savita Halappanavar on Wednesday 21st November 2012 in University Hospital Galway dramatically focused national [1] and international [2] attention on the issue of access to a termination in Ireland where the life and health of a pregnant woman are threatened. However, her death also raises important and wider issues around equity in health status, health service access and health service uptake for the minority groups within Ireland. It is clear that issues of ethnicity [3] and race [4] in Ireland are clearly contested. However, this is not a reason or excuse for inaction. Ireland’s inaction on the issue of transparency in the health of minority groups is unacceptable. Addressing the issue of race, the US Associate Director for Minority Health stated almost 20 years ago that ‘race should be viewed within public health surveillance as a sociological phenomenon’ and that its ‘significance is mainly derived from the social arrangements’ [5]. He went on to describe both ethnicity and race ‘as markers used to better understand the risk factors’. The Health Service Executive’s Social Inclusion Unit stated in 2009 that ‘the need for more consistent collection of Ethnic Equality data is underpinned by Irish equality legislation and an extensive policy framework’ [6]. However, at the end of 2012, we still have no ethnic identifier routinely being used in relation to health data. This is odd given asylum applications, for example, peaked in Ireland a decade ago in 2002 at 11,634 [7]. The realisation for the need of this type of information is hardly new in Ireland [8]. Action 12 of the Department of Health and Children’s 2004 Health Information Strategy states that: ‘To allow for the analysis of health data by key subgroups as described in the National Anti-Poverty Strategy (1997) and related policies, relevant health information systems will incorporate the required degree of functionality and record, as appropriate, the attributes that on their own or through their association with poverty or social exclusion contribute to inequalities in health. These attributes include: age, gender, socio-economic group, being disabled, being homeless, living in institutions, race, membership of the Traveller community or other ethnic minority group, including refugee or asylum seeker and family status (e.g. lone parent)’ [9]. At present, significant resources are having to be spent in targeted research to explore the issue of health status of the minority groups. The results are not surprisingly shocking [10]. What is needed, however, is the routine collection, analysis and dissemination of such information. The absence of an ethnic identifier in Ireland sits comfortably beside other deliberate information deficits. These include the continuing absence of postcodes, small area health data and the absence of routine social class classification of morbidity and mortality data. These deficits are not accidental [11]. They are designed to hinder meaningful analysis of health data [12]. O’Toole [13] neatly describes such statistics in Ireland as ‘the unknown known’, stating that ‘you have to positively decide not to know the awkward fact’.