18 November 2012, 06:49 PM IST
Last Tuesday, if you'd run a word-association test on me for 'Galway', I'd have said 'James' or 'flute'.
All that changed on Wednesday. Now, Galway, for me, will always be associated with Dr Savita Halappanavar.
That's where in western Ireland this 31-year-old dentist lived, and died. From Belgaum to Galway is a long journey, but it ended under tragic circumstances and her story has been told and retold across the world. While India follows her story keenly, at least until the next new, new news takes precedence, Ireland is tracking the same story because it has rekindled the long and bitter debate about abortion.
Briefly the facts of the case. Dr Savita died on October 28 in a Galway hospital due to blood poisoning, after she suffered a miscarriage following severe back pain. She was allegedly denied an abortion by doctors though she repeatedly asked for one, because local medical guidelines don't permit it as long as there is a fetal heartbeat. It's not surprising as Ireland is a predominantly Catholic country and the Church doesn't allow abortions, period.
It fell upon her engineer husband Praveen Halappanavar to bring her body to Belgaum, where her parents live, and the last rites were performed there.
The story may have ended there. A tragic death of a young woman in a foreign land.
But another story began unfolding when a Dublin newspaper published the details of her death. A government probe was ordered, and its report is awaited. Candlelight vigils and protests were held in many cities across the UK and more are scheduled in Europe. Pro-choice groups seized the issue to hammer home their case for a change in abortion laws. And pro-choice groups dug in their heels and insisted it was about medical ethics rather than religious dogma.
In India too, some political groups grabbed the issue to put pressure on the government to do something, anything.
Dr Savita became a rallying point for pro-choice protesters in Ireland. And, in a sign of these times, it was on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that people poured out their grief for a tragic loss, anguish that nothing has changed over the years, anger at a recalcitrant government, sympathy for her family and determination to push for change.
As Katherine Butler, a commentator in a British newspaper, wrote in a recent essay about the abortion debate over the years: "Two things have changed. Cold comfort to her grieving husband, but in death, Savita has given the debate a human face. And a new generation of young women has suddenly woken up to the legacy of the vicious battles over abortion rights that those of us who came of age in the 1980s were powerless to combat. This time, the pro-life extremists must be seen off by enlisting the compassionate majority. A good place to start would be to spread the slogan somebody had on a placard outside the Dail on Wednesday night: "Savita had a heartbeat too".
Indeed, Savita had a heartbeat, and her doctors perhaps forgot that, and probably caused an avoidable death. As her grief-stricken father said: "Nobody should die like my daughter." And that can happen only when humanitarian and medical considerations over-ride all others.
Until then, we can only grieve for Savita, and for others like her.
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