10,000 in Ireland protest death of woman denied abortion
Source: latimes.com
About 10,000 people marched through Dublin and observed a minute’s silence Saturday in memory of the Indian dentist who died of blood poisoning in an Irish hospital after being denied an abortion.
Marchers, many of them mothers and daughters walking side by side, chanted "Never again!" and held pictures of Savita Halappanavar as they paraded across the city to stage a nighttime candlelight vigil outside the office of Prime Minister Enda Kenny.The 31-year-old Halappanavar, who was 17 weeks pregnant with her first child, died Oct. 28, one week after being hospitalized with severe pain at the start of a miscarriage. Her death, made public by her husband last week, has highlighted Ireland’s long struggle to come to grips with abortion.
Doctors refused her requests to remove the fetus until its heartbeat stopped four days after her hospitalization. Hours later she became critically ill and her organs began to fail. She died three days later of blood poisoning. Her widower and activists say she could have survived, and the spread of infection been stopped, had the fetus been removed sooner.
The case illustrates 20 years of confusion in abortion law in Ireland, where the practice is outlawed in the constitution. A 1992 Supreme Court ruling decreed that abortions should be legal to save the life of the woman, including a woman who makes credible threats to commit suicide if denied one. But successive governments have refused to pass legislation spelling out the rules governing that general principle, leaving the decision up to individual doctors in an environment of secrecy.
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Read the full article at: latimes.com
