The most positive possible interpretation of the Savita Halappanavar case is that she was the victim of unintentional homicide, as opposed to wilful murder. Congratulations, 21st century Ireland.
An outrage like this was always going to happen; indeed, it has surely happened before, many times, though we don't know to how many Irish women. Kieran Healy here explains the modern historical context of the current state of abortion in Ireland, particularly in regards to the "X case" of the early 1990s:
Chief amongst the social crises of 1992 was the X-case.
A fourteen year-old girl, pregnant as the result of rape by a neighbor,
sought to leave the country to have an abortion in England, as
thousands of Irish women did and still do. Her parents asked the police
whether it would be possible to collect any DNA evidence during this
process, which brought the matter to the Attorney General’s attention.
He sought, and was granted, a court injunction preventing her from
traveling for the abortion under Article 40.3.3 of the Irish constitution,
which had been passed in 1983 as the “Pro-Life amendment” and which
prohibited abortion in Ireland. The resulting constitutional crisis saw
the Supreme Court issue a hasty ruling permitting the girl to travel,
but under a strained interpretation of the law. So in November of 1992
the Government introduced three new amendments meant to clarify things. The result was that things reverted much to the status quo ante,
which essentially allowed Ireland to export its abortion problem to the
United Kingdom while leaving it unclear what doctors facing a medical
emergency during pregnancy were in a position to do.
The current state of Irish law as regards abortion is murky. Yes, if you sort through all the links in Healy's post you will see that it is certainly true that if Halappanavar had received sensible medical treatment she would have lived, and her doctors would not have been prosecuted. But the Irish government has by and large left legal issues of precisely the sort the Halappanavar affair involves unaddressed, chiefly because talking about such things openly would have created, well, discomfort. And the Irish medical profession has been mostly silent as well, for the same reason. (In the Healy post linked above, scroll down to Ronan Delaney's comment at 2:12.) In this sense, the "X case" is still very much open. The relevant Irish court ruling papered over a vast moral abyss, a failure hardly unique in Irish history.
As to why Irish law and the Irish medical profession are so screwed up, well, that's hard to answer. The short version is, yes, the Church, and so, well, this. But as to the full story historically, it is only kind of true that it is Catholicism to blame. Which is not to say that the Church is not one of the main culprits, or the main culprit! It is instead to attempt to put names to the unindicted co-conspirators.
The issues involved are complex and not easily dealt with in a blog post. But where I'd recommend anyone interested should start is with a very good, pioneering essay by Sandra McAvoy in Ireland in the 1950s: The Lost Decade. McAvoy does a good job of explaining why the abortion issue is not something that arose all of a sudden in 1992, but is rather something encoded into the modern state's legal and cultural DNA.
This is in no small measure to do with the consolidation on the part of the Hierarchy of cultural authority, in the context of early Free State clashes with Protestant doctrine regarding divorce and contraception. I'd add that it is also related to the Hierarchy's perceived lack of a moral monopoly in the wake of the violence of the rebellion and civil war, and a widespread belief on the part of many groups and individuals that one of the most important ways that Ireland deserved to take its place among the nations of the world was by exemplifying High Moral Standards.
Controlling women in the arena of sexual expression was in all these areas key. You don't have to look too hard in Irish newspapers of the 1920s to find an awful lot of panic over a supposed infanticide epidemic throughout the countryside, for one thing. For another, you can find stories of young women being briefly jailed or fined for speaking obscene expressions in public. After the censorship laws came into effect in 1929, published material relating to contraception was subject to banning. Contraception was illegal from 1935 until 1980.
McAvoy is good at reminding us that as regards abortion, the controversy started pretty much simultaneously with the beginning of autonomy in the 1920s -- there was a heartfelt issue regarding craniotomy and local government appointments in 1931, for example, despite the fact that even the most passionate anti-abortion advocates had to concede the ludicrousness of their case, when pressed: the Archbishop of Tuam had to admit that his crusade to make craniotomy a criminal offense foundered because "it was not easy to prove that a foetus was alive before an operation was performed." Look at the Halappanavar case -- not much progress has been made from 1992, sure, but also try 1931.
McAvoy also takes you through the chilling Mamie Cadden case. But if you really want to grasp the mindset involved, dig this from "a 1956 Irish medical article on the management of pregnancy in patients suffering heart disease":
Advice as to the spacing of pregnancies and the use of the safe period should be tendered if thought necessary, but no matter how severe the lesion or disastrous the pregnancy, no woman should ever be told that if she has another baby it will kill her.
Savita Halappanavar was informed, reportedly, that she could not have her hopeless pregnancy terminated "because the foetal heartbeat was still present and they were told, 'this is a Catholic country.'"
At least her killers did not tell her any lies. And at least they were being historically consistent with dominant, official Irish values, as embraced and enforced by powerful, if remarkably insecure, Irish men.
