It’s 12 years since Savita Halappanavar died from septic shock after suffering a miscarriage 17 weeks into her pregnancy. Ireland’s arcane abortion laws had prevented her from receiving the termination which would have saved her life. Outrage over her death had a catalysing effect on the campaign for full bodily autonomy for women – a movement that would culminate in the historical removal of the regressive and misogynistic Eighth Amendment in 2018.
The story of Halappanavar’s death and its seismic impact is retold in Irish language documentary series Scannal (RTÉ One, Tuesday, 7pm), with the first of two sensitive and wrenching episodes recounting the events leading up to her death. It makes for heartbreaking viewing. We learn that Halappanavar, a dentist from southwestern India, was fun-loving and outgoing – very different from her shy husband Praveen, who relocated to Galway to work at Boston Scientific. “She was open, warm – made friends easily,” says Beirní Ní Chuinn, a journalist who covered the story.
When the couple came to Ireland, they might have been forgiven for thinking they had moved to just another supposedly advanced western democracy. But in terms of healthcare, Catholicism still had its decrepit claws in the system. “An awful lot of people ... would not have been aware how present in a legal and medical sense, Catholic teaching was,” says Kitty Holland, the Irish Times journalist who reported extensively on the case
Scannal: Savita is a challenging watch. It chronicles hour by hour how Halappanavar’s condition deteriorated – and the constraints the medical staff felt under because of the prohibition against abortion.
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In any sane country, Halappanavar would have been granted a termination long before the sepsis had become too advanced to treat. In Ireland, staff felt obliged to wait because the carrying out of an abortion without a “real and substantive” risk to the life of the mother was punishable by up to 14 years in prison. “A foetus at 17 weeks cannot survive, it is far too early,” says Dr Máire Treasa Ní Cheallaigh. “What made it all the more difficult for Savita was that another scan was done and the foetal heartbeat could still be heard.”
With the sepsis spreading, immediate treatment was crucial. Yet Ireland’s arcane laws – a direct consequence of the ham-fisted bludgeoning into the Constitution of the Eighth Amendment in 1983 – served to delay and distract staff and to introduce uncertainty to what should have been an open-and-shut medical intervention.
“The clock is ticking once the membrane has ruptured,” says professor Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, the former president of the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, who chaired the HSE inquiry into the case. “Early in the morning when they found a high pulse rate, that was probably the last chance they could have done something but there was a schedule delay because of the worry they had in the back of the mind – it might be a criminal offence if I remove the foetal heart.”
Archive interviews with her husband capture a man in a state of stunned grief – processing both the loss of his wife and also the medieval essence of an Irish healthcare system that, just 12 years ago, found itself beholden to the crosier as much as to sound medical practice. “She is not a Catholic, she is not Irish either – why impose the law on her?” he says. “I was still in shock. I couldn’t believe it.”
