"Pro Life" - UR DOIN IT RONG

Here I am, banging on about abortion again. It’s almost like I’m a progressive feminist or something, innit? Anyway, Ireland, not exactly known as a safe haven of open-minded attitudes to reproductive rights, was in the news last week (I know, I am behind, bad blogger) in the darkest way possible. Normally things trend on Twitter for the fluffiest and harebrained of reasons, but if you haven’t read the story already I advise you to spend some time on the #Savita hashtag to get yourselves up to speed.

In simple terms, from what we know from the press coverage of the case, a 31 year old (married) woman (intentionally) pregnant for the first time went to A&E at University Hospital, Galway presenting with back pain. She was found to be miscarrying but her requests for a medical termination were alledgedly denied by staff at the hospital as a foetal heartbeat could still be detected. At one point it is alledged that she was told, “this is a Catholic country”, by way of explanation for the non-intervention. The dead foetus was removed once a heartbeat could no longer be found but on the 28^th October 2012, Savita Halappanavar died of septicaemia.

For a thorough and accesible historical overview of the legal situation in Ireland I recommend this as further reading. For a historical overview of what happens when you make abortion illegal, read this, but be warned it comes with a great big content warning as it contains very distressing and disturbing imagery and content.

Now, there are small-scale arguments as to why Savita was not given a termination on arrival at the hospital, principally driven by the argument, which from an intellectual point of view I can understand, that doctors might be fearful of losing their livelihood, of being struck off and so on, given the current legal position on abortion in the country (see above). And you know what? I hear that. Losing your job is pretty terrible, especially given the global north’s current state of fiscal meltdown. But more terrible than knowing that your intervention would likely have prevented a woman’s death? I’m not so sure about that. But my contention with all of this isn’t just at this level, but on a macro scale.

The pro-life argument on a larger scale (i.e. devoid of domestic legislation and divorced from individual experience) is usually that human life, however we define that, begins at conception. Now, I am not going to make a secret of the fact that I think that this is total garbage (and here is a solid scientific explanation of why), but that is a strongly-held belief and while I think it is moronic, I do understand it, as in I understand what its supporters mean by it. So, fine. But here is the thing that I really, truly do not understand. If you believe that a zygote, embryo or foetus is a human life, and you also believe that an adult human is a human life, then the thing that I need explained to me is why the first life trumps the rights of the second. Why? I am not asking this to be facetious, I really just do not understand. Because the argument that the foetus has equal rights with the carrier doesn’t square with the argument that it also has greater rights. I’m no mathematician, but even I can see that that equation just doesn’t work.

And it makes me so, so angry that women – actual human women who are definitely alive and participating in their human lives – are still, STILL dying over this issue – not just in some far-flung corner of the globe where we all ‘know’ (or tell ourselves) that women’s rights and human rights are backwards or non-existent, but here, HERE in the global north on the doorstep of my country, the UK. It should make you angry, too. Because we seem to be wholly prepared to get very fired up about the failed deportation of a radical Muslim preacher who may very well be repellent but, y’know, has never actually been convicted of a crime here, but we are strangely mute about the fact that a different religion has a stranglehold not just over the reproductive rights but the actual right to life of half of its citizens. It is twenty fucking twelve, people. How many more Savitas have to die to uphold the ‘sanctity’ of life?