Most people in America do not know who Savita Halappanavar was. Everyone in Ireland does.
Here is a contemporary report following her death almost exactly 12 years ago:
Prime Minister Enda Kenny said he was awaiting findings from three investigations into the death of Savita Halappanavar, an Indian living in Galway since 2008 who was 17 weeks along in her pregnancy. The 31-year-old’s case highlights the bizarre legal limbo in which pregnant women facing severe health problems in predominantly Catholic Ireland can find themselves.
Ireland’s constitution officially bans abortion, but a 1992 Supreme Court ruling found it should be legalized for situations when the woman’s life is at risk from continuing the pregnancy. Five governments since have refused to pass a law resolving the confusion, leaving Irish hospitals reluctant to terminate pregnancies except in the most obviously life-threatening circumstances.
University Hospital Galway in western Ireland declined to say whether doctors believed Halappanavar’s blood poisoning could have been reversed had she received an abortion rather than wait for the fetus to die on its own. In a statement it described its own investigation into the death, and a parallel probe by the national government’s Health Service Executive, as “standard practice” whenever a pregnant woman dies in a hospital. The Galway coroner also planned a public inquest.
Savita Halappanavar’s husband, Praveen, said doctors determined that she was miscarrying within hours of her hospitalization for severe pain on Sunday, Oct. 21. He said that over the next three days doctors refused their requests for a termination of her fetus to combat her own surging pain and fading health.
“Savita was really in agony. She was very upset, but she accepted she was losing the baby,” he told The Irish Times in a telephone interview from Belgaum, southwest India. “When the consultant came on the ward rounds on Monday morning, Savita asked: ‘If they could not save the baby, could they induce to end the pregnancy?’ The consultant said: ‘As long as there is a fetal heartbeat, we can’t do anything.'”
… He said his wife vomited repeatedly and collapsed in a restroom that night, but doctors wouldn’t terminate the fetus because its heart was still beating.
The fetus died the following day and its remains were surgically removed. Within hours, Praveen Halappanavar said, his wife was placed under sedation in intensive care with systemic blood poisoning and he was never able to speak with her again. By Saturday her heart, kidneys and liver had stopped working and she was pronounced dead early Sunday, Oct. 28.
It took six years, but there was a direct line from Savita Halappanavar’s agonizing, preventable death to the amendment of Ireland’s Constitution in 2018. More than two-thirds of Irish voters backed the repeal of the country’s 1983 anti-abortion constitutional amendment that had led to the denial of her necessary care and, thus, to her painful death.
This mass-support for abortion rights in Ireland was portrayed as surprising because Ireland is an overwhelmingly Catholic nation and the laws they rejected had the full-throated, absolute support of the Catholic Church. But that’s actually why the result was not surprising. The Irish people were thoroughly acquainted with the church’s actual arguments, it’s moral logic, and it’s demonstrated level of concern for the health of women. And thus the Irish people voted accordingly. They were all too familiar with this Catholic teaching to respect it.
The state of Texas now has anti-abortion laws very similar to those of Ireland in 2012. Those laws create the same problems in Texas that they created at Galway University Hospital as Savita Halappanavar was dying during a painful miscarriage.
Exactly the same problems. And exactly the same results. Here is a 2024 report from Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana for ProPublica: “A Texas Woman Died After the Hospital Said It Would be a ‘Crime’ to Intervene in Her Miscarriage.”
Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.
The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.
But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.
Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.
Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.
Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.
ProPublica is telling these women’s stories this week, starting with Barnica’s. Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”
Same law. Same result. Death.
Predictable, obvious, preventable, agonizing, infuriating, callous, smugly pious death.
Texas writer rmj of Adventus has an appropriately angry reaction to ProPublica’s report, writing:
“Miscarriage” is the lay term. The medical term is “spontaneous abortion.” It does not mean “a willful act of murder.” It means a premature termination of pregnancy. In this case, the willful act of murder was refusing proper medical treatment of a condition. The crime was not providing medical care.
And three years later we haven’t heard about it because the mother was not a blonde, white woman whose husband was a white, English speaking professional. She was, in fact, from Honduras. This wasn’t a fetus discarded by an uncaring abortionist. This is a family discarded by an uncaring system. It’s only surprising that they aren’t still invisible, and unheard.
I fear that rmj’s cynical take on the public response to Josseli Barnica’s death may be accurate. The people of Ireland had the capacity to care about Savita in a way that white folks in America do not exhibit a capacity to care about Josseli. And Savita’s family were relatively wealthy professionals with the financial wherewithal to hire good attorneys in Galway and in India who were able to inform the public about the gross injustice of her death. Josseli’s family does not have such resources — particularly not in contrast to the deep pockets and massive platforms of the self-righteous, self-appointed Moral Superiors rushing to explain that her medically preventable death was a necessary sacrifice for the maintenance of their self-image as such,
Say her name: Josseli Barnica.
And say what killed her.
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