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ABSTRACT
On 28 October 2012, Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman living in Ireland, died in hospital while under medical care for a miscarrying pregnancy. According to her husband, her repeated requests for an abortion were ignored because of the presence of a foetal heartbeat. Ms Halappanavar’s death was a critical event in the process leading to a referendum on 25 May 2018, when the Irish electorate voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, removing the constitutional ban on abortion. The name Savita has become indelibly linked to the changing course of abortion politics, so it is timely to reassess the role of the media in shaping the parameters of the debate about the impact of her death on the issue. This study presents a frame analysis of Irish newspapers in the weeks following her death, mapping the political, medical, legal and socio-ethical discourses, as well as the related contemporaneous events that set the agenda for the type of debate that was to follow. It identifies four media frames: Public Tragedy, Political Opportunity, Abortion Legacy and Maternal Health. Our central argument is that the overall effect of media framing provided much face-saving for politicians in the way that the legislative issue was viewed through a conservative party-political lens, despite public outrage.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Dr Orla McDonnell is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Limerick. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of social theory and health, health politics, and bioethics. She is co-author of Social Theory, Health and Healthcare (Palgrave, 2009). She has written about the discourses surrounding reproductive politics in Ireland, including (with J. Allison, 2006) ‘From biopolitics to bioethics: Church, state, medicine and assisted reproductive technology in Ireland’. Sociology of Health & Illness, 28(6), ‘Striving towards a normative identity: The social reproduction of the meaning of ART in Ireland’ (2012) in Cultural Dynamics of Women’s Lives (Ana C. Bastos et al. ed., Information Age Publishing) and, more recently, ‘The veto of moral politics: The catholic church and ARTs in Ireland’ (2017) in Assisted Reproduction Across Borders: Feminist Perspectives on Normalizations, Disruptions and Transmissions (ed. Merete Lie and Niana Lykke, Routledge)
Dr Padraig Murphy is Assistant Professor in Communication at Dublin City University. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of science, environment and health communication, and public engagement. His work uses approaches from Science and Technology Studies to examine biopolitics and societal engagement. He planned and managed a citizens’ jury on the trialling of the GM potato in Ireland, the Irish GM Potato Community of Inquiry project, funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Murphy is course director of the MSc in Science and Health Communication at DCU and leader of the Celsius research group. He is a co-convenor of the Campus Engage working group on Engaged Research. He is also author of Biotechnology, Education and Life Politics: Debating Genetic Futures from School to Society (Routledge, 2014) and co-author of Little Country, Big Talk: Science Communication in Ireland (2017).
Notes
1 This move follows recommendations from a Citizen’s Assembly in 2016 and a Parliamentary Committee on the Eight Amendment in late 2017. The latter recommended legislation to allow for abortion on request up to 12 weeks, and up to 24 weeks in medical cases where there is a serious risk to the life, physical or mental health of pregnant women and in the case of fatal foetal abnormality.
2 In A, B and C v Ireland, the ECHR (December 2010) ruled that the Irish state was in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in relation to the woman known as applicant C who had unplanned pregnancy while in remission from cancer and was unable to find an Irish doctor to make a determination about the risk involved for her or her foetus if she continued her pregnancy (Bacik, Citation2015). The case highlighted the absence of legislation concerning the limited circumstances in which women could lawfully access abortion in Ireland.
3 This comment arose when the coroner berated the nurse who had explained to Ms Halappanavar that she could not have an abortion while there was still a foetal heartbeat because Ireland was a Catholic country. The coroner held her responsible for the international headline issue that had garnered so much negative coverage (McCarthy, Citation2016, pp. 19–20).
4 Dr Peter Boylan is a former Master of the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin and currently chairs the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists; Rhona Mahony is current Master of the hospital.
5 The pro-choice campaign in the previous abortion referenda debates of 1992 and 2002 had argued against the rolling back of the X case Supreme Court ruling in relation to the threat of suicide as a grounds for accessing abortion, but it also opposed the proposed distinction between life and health being written into the Constitution, forewarning that cases like that of Ms Halappanavar would result. While the pro-life campaign was united in its opposition to the 1992 referendum, it was divided on the 2002 referendum, which in essence was the same as the Twelfth Amendment in 1992. The pro-life lobby reversed its position on the 1992 referendum on the premise that the proposed amendment in 2002 would offer a clear legal and, hence, moral distinction between treatment in life saving situations and abortion. However, other anti-abortion campaigners rejected this and called for a ‘no’ vote.
6 The Iona Institute is a conservative lobby group that supports Catholic teaching on issues such as abortion and marriage.