VICTORIA WHITE: Savita’s death is not about abortion — it is about medical negligence
260
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Savita Halappanavar has become an icon. Her death in Galway University Hospital a year ago has taken on mythic qualities.
Kitty Holland’s new book, Savita: The Tragedy That Shook A Nation, gives us pictures of Savita, the child dancer, the proud graduate, the devoted daughter, the loyal friend.
We see Savita’s life through the prism of her death and her death is explained by our Constitutional prohibition on abortion. Even her grieving husband, Praveen, says “maybe Savita was born to change the law here.”
But she wasn’t, of course. She was born, in all probability, to be a wife and mother and an accomplished professional. She had it all at her finger-tips. And it was ripped away by our medical service. Her death means we can’t look after people properly, particularly not pregnant women. Her legacy should certainly not be the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill, nor even the deletion of the Eighth Amendment. It should be a proper, safe, functioning health service that treats all our citizens equally.
The terrible story of Savita’s death is not about abortion. It is a story about medical negligence of appalling proportions.
Holland counters criticism that Savita’s story has been monopolised by the pro-choice movement: this was the context in which her death was seen by her husband and friends. It was her horrified friends who stood helplessly by as she breathed her last in that Galway hospital. The story was leaked to Holland, probably because she was known to be a pro-choice journalist and she quickly and conscientiously followed it up.
And when you think about it, for a moment it, becomes so obvious why the abortion issue loomed so large for the Indian community. It is because attitudes to abortion are a fault-line of cultural difference between our two countries. If you’ve ever been an emigrant, take a second to remember what that felt like. I remember complaining endlessly to other English speakers about everything that was different about my host country.
When something as horrific as the inexplicable death of a treasured friend occurs in a foreign hospital, the story that will make the most sense is that it could not have happened in the safe place that is home.
That may, indeed, be the case here, but in ways which have nothing to do with our abortion law. It may, indeed, be the case that no hospital in Savita’s home town of Belgaum, India, would been so ruinously negligent as to let that lovely young woman slip through its fingers when there were, says the Hiqua report, 13 different occasions on which a potentially life-saving intervention could have been made.
The issue here was never abortion. The issue is the shocking state of our health system.
It may be quite true that if Savita had had an abortion when she requested one, on Monday, Oct 21, or Tuesday, Oct 22, it would have saved her life. But the real issue is that nobody knew her life was at risk. Savita wasn’t requesting an abortion because she feared for her health. She feared psychological trauma. She also wanted to get back to her beloved parents, before they left for India.
Savita’s consultant, Dr Katherine Astbury, did not refuse to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy because she was constrained by her interpretation of our abortion law. She didn’t think there was any threat to Savita’s health. As she said in her evidence to the coroner’s inquest: “there was no suggestion that she was in any way unwell…”
No suggestion? Except that, according to the evidence of Professor Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, to the HSE enquiry, infection is the cause of a miscarriage such as Savita’s — in the second trimester of pregnancy, presenting with her membranes bulging and her baby alive — in 77% of cases.
Infection should have been suspected from the very moment she was admitted to the hospital. Arulkumaran said he would have offered to terminate the pregnancy on Sunday, Oct 21, and advised termination after Savita’s waters broke in the early hours of Monday, Oct 22.
Astbury should have intervened to terminate the pregnancy straight-away, on medical evidence alone. She would not have faced any legal obstruction in doing so.