Shame, Shame Ireland

In India, women deliver at home, they deliver in the autos while on the way to hospital, in ambulances. Sometimes they deliver babies even on the doorsteps of hospitals because the hospital sentry did not allwo them to enter the hospital. We have a maternal mortality of around 250/ lakh which comes to a staggering number of 250,000 maternal deaths (well, I might have missed a couple of zeroes). So if Savita Halappanavar had died in India, she would have been only a blip on the map of maternal mortality in India. but unfortunately, she died in Ireland, where the MMR is 6/ lakh! And it is a country with a mere population of a mere 4.5 milliion. Are you kidding me?, Bangalore has 10 million people, and India has 1000 million.

A mother and newborn in a district hospital in Karnataka.

It is a tragedy of enormous proportions when a mother dies in a developed country like Ireland because of lack of medical care. And that too because of trivial religious excuses. "This is a Catholic country", is what her husband was told by the doctors who refused to terminate her pregnancy. I would consider this as a case of medical negligence. Any doctor is bound by the Hippocrates oath and the Geneva convention which urges you to save the life of the patient irrespective of religious or racial/ethnic concerns. If a doctor waited to terminate a pregnancy and endangered the life of the mother because of it, he/she is guilty of failing to provide the expected standard of care. They cannot hide behind the excuse of the country's laws and rules. After all, what law is there which outlaws saving the life of a person?

Will this happen in India? Yes, why not? Here patients lose eyesight after cataract surgeries in camps, women are sterilized by scamsters and ward boys give injections. Anything can happen in India. But no hospital waits for the foetal heartbeat to stop before deciding to terminate the pregnancy. It is plainly an outrage. As Savita's mother lamented "You sacrificed the life of my 30 year old daughter to save a 17 week old foetus".

Now the Irish government is on record offering all help for Savita's husband to rebuild his life. What are they gonna do? Provide him with women to date so that he can select a suitable wife? How does a government help to rebuild the vaccuum left by the loss of a spouse? A responsible government should have never let that happen in the first place. And to this moment, the Irish politicians are evasive and dilly-dallying about legislating to make abortions legal. How many more lives have to be lost for them to wake up and act? Shame on you Ireland.