What barbaric, primitive practice allows this?

THE death of Savita Halappanavar, the dentist who died after a prolonged miscarriage at a hospital in Galway, is under investigation.

The exact circumstances of her death are not yet open for discussion. If I wrote what I really think, this newspaper might get sued.

What I can say is that Savita’s husband Praveen Halappanavar, speaking from India on the BBC news on Wednesday, reported that his miscarrying wife was told, “This is a Catholic country”, when she asked that the foetus her body was spontaneously aborting be medically removed. Draw your own conclusions. Meanwhile, I will keep it general.

Normally when you hear of a woman dying from reproductive complications, you think of the very poorest least developed places on earth. Sierra Leone, maybe, or Afghanistan. If someone you knew was living abroad and came back in a coffin because she was refused a simple yet life-saving procedure on religious grounds – religious beliefs your friend did not even share – you would be utterly outraged. You’d be thundering about barbarism, primitive practice, human rights, the lot.

What I don’t understand is what ‘pro-life’ actually means. If, in the future, my daughter were carrying my potential grandchild and wanted or needed an abortion, I know whose life I would be pro. It would be hers. All the way, without question or hesitation. She is the human whose life I am interested in, because she is born, she is alive, she is here, and she matters more than a foetus. But what is really at stake here is who owns a woman’s body. The woman herself or the state?

The Irish government is not pro-life, nor are any previous Irish governments, because for the past twenty years they have all sat on their hands rather than implement the 1992 ruling that says abortion should be performed when a woman’s life is in danger.

To reiterate – the life of a woman is more important than that of an foetus. A whole woman, alive and embedded in family, in society, in themselves – yes, they are MUCH more important than the beginnings of a life. But not in Ireland. Oh no. Not legally, not medically, not socially. The Irish state – despite some of the best equality legislation in the world – still legally regards women as nothing more than foetus carriers.

Newsflash – the Catholic church is not in charge of Ireland anymore. Nor are the pro-lifers. Ireland has changed since 1984 when that teenage girl died alone giving birth in a Longford field – or has it?

We need to look again at our peculiarly toxic Irish mix of state cowardice, moral paralysis, hysterical bullying from a crazed minority, and the rest of us not getting up and making some noise about the legal ownership of women’s bodies in Ireland in 2012. Our bodies belong to nobody but ourselves.