At least four women have died due to abortion law says Boylan
But No side denies claim
ONE of the country’s most prominent obstetricians says he knows of at least four women who have died as a result of the Eighth Amendment.
Dr Peter Boylan, former master of the National Maternity Hospital, named Savita Halappanavar – at whose inquest he was an expert witness – along with Michelle Harte, Sheila Hodgers and ‘Miss P’ as women whose lives were lost as a result of the 1983 amendment.
‘Savita Halappanavar died as a result of the Eighth Amendment,’ Dr Boylan said in an interview with Hot Press magazine.
‘Michelle Harte… died as a consequence of the Eighth Amendment. Sheila Hodgers died as a consequence of the Eighth Amendment. We have the Miss P case.’
Dentist Savita Halappanavar, 31, died in October 2012 at University Hospital Galway after being denied an emergency termination.
The Indian woman was 17 weeks’ pregnant when she died after contracting sepsis during a miscarriage. Her family said that after she was admitted she had severe back pain and was miscarrying and asked several times for her pregnancy to be terminated.
Cancer victim Michelle Harte, 39, from Ardamine, Wexford, said she was advised in 2010 by her doctors at Cork University Hospital – where she was being treated for cancer – to terminate her pregnancy because of risks to her health.
However, an ethics forum at the hospital decided not to allow her to have an abortion in Ireland on the basis that her life was not under ‘immediate threat’. Her cancer treatment was delayed due to her pregnancy and her condition deteriorated. Although seriously ill she had to travel to England for a termination.
She campaigned for a change in Ireland’s abortion laws but died in November 2011.
In 1983, Sheila Hodgers was refused cancer treatment because she was pregnant. Her premature baby died at birth and Sheila Hodgers died two days later.
‘Miss P’ was pregnant when she suffered a brain trauma at a hospital outside Dublin in November 2016, two days after she was admitted complaining of severe headaches.
Due to concerns by doctors over the legal implications of her pregnancy, she was kept on life-support until the High Court ruled that there was virtually no chance of the baby being born alive.
Changed his view on abortion
Dr Boylan said that he used to be opposed to abortion as a young doctor but that his opinion changed after witnessing firsthand the pain and suffering many women are forced to endure with pregnancies involving fatal foetal abnormalities, life-threatening situations or crisis pregnancies.
He said doctors have serious difficulties operating under the Eighth Amendment, that they can face up to 14 years in prison under Irish law for carrying out any type of abortion, if there is a possibility that they might be accused of failing to comply fully with what are ‘stringent yet dangerously grey legal strictures’.
Dr Boylan said claims that one in five pregnancies in the UK end in abortion are wrong.
‘That’s wrong,’ he said. ‘The true figure is about one in ten. And the reason why’s it’s one in ten is because they exclude miscarriages from their definition of pregnancy.’
However, the Save the 8th organisation said Dr Boylan’s comments are misleading, and ‘the facts simply do not add up.’
It said Sheila Hodgers ‘tragically lost her life on March 19, 1983’.
‘The Eighth Amendment was not adopted until six months after her death.’
The group claimed that for Dr Boylan to say that she died because of a law that did not exist at the time was misleading in the extreme.
The group continued: ‘He names Savita Halappanavar. No less than three enquiries into Savita’s death found that she had died as a result of mismanaged sepsis.
‘He names Michelle Harte. Michelle Harte actually had an abortion, as a result of a private insurance company denying pregnant women access to a drug trial. She tragically died anyway.’