© 2013, Kimberly Campanello

Inishmurray island is off the coast of Co. Sligo, Ireland. The date Savita Halapannavar died was the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time according to the Catholic Church calendar. Jeremiah 31: 7-9 was the first reading on that day at Catholic masses worldwide. Regarding the difficulty of explaining his wife’s death to her family in India where he took her ashes on November 3rd, Praveen Halappanavar told The Irish Times, ‘So I had to explain the whole thing, about the law there [in Ireland] and how [when] the foetus is live [ . . . ] some people even laughed at me. “That’s crazy,” they said. And I just had to tell them, that’s the way it is, that unfortunately that’s the country we were in at the time’. Savita Halappanavar’s death highlighted the fact that abortion is illegal in Ireland and that there was a lack of legal clarity regarding whether doctors can terminate a pregnancy if the life or health of the mother is at risk. Due in great part to Irish and international debate after Halapannavar’s death, both houses of the Oireachtas (the Irish legislature) passed the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, which allows for abortion if a woman’s life is at risk, including from suicide. On 30 July 2013, President Michael D. Higgins signed it into law. However, as The Guardian reports, ‘The legislation is unlikely to stop the abortion trail of women from Ireland to Britain. [ . . . ] [A]bout 4,000 Irish women traveled to British hospitals and clinics to terminate their pregnancies last year’. Additionally, ‘[t]he new law does not include those women seeking terminations because of rape or incest’, and also does not extend to women whose fetuses that will not survive a full-term pregnancy or for long after birth.