Friday, 5 July 2013

To Hell or to Galway..

Mr Hallappanavar is to sue the Health Service Executive and the Galway hospital where his wife was left  to succumb to advancing sepsis, as she lay surrounded by doctors, nurses, and magical  medical charting. The fact that five TDs,  the majority of  elected representatives there, who voted against the very limited Abortion legislation now presented are from Galway has supported his decision, he says. Yes. Quite.

If I had standing, I would sue the Hospital likewise, and  also the Government  for this sorry, inadequate and messed up piece of legislation  ignoring as it does foetal abnormalities, conceptions following on a rape, while busy busy busy calculating how many  psychiatrists it takes to certify suicidality. Our very own Angels dancing on the head of a pin.  The holy toes well clear of  the waters of choice, a woman's right to choose.

So much thrashing about regarding suicide. It  must be included to legislate for the X case, mustn't it? But....but.. guaranteed to open the floodgates isn't it? Oh..oh... and also to encourage suicidal folk. And let's not forget all those women calculated to feign suicidality,. And now let's all jump down the rabbit hole of  medical meanderings as to whether abortion can ever be antidote to suicide. We haven't done that one yet.  Its a red herring . In Galway, in the broader  medical community, the psychiatric contingent, there is a rump hell bent on control, on preventing this decision going to the childbearer. I suppose it's Catholic, certainly Conservative, and simply elitist in mind set..

I don't know those women. The other women, in the actual world struggle, agonise, and decide about abortion. I listened ten years ago to a dear friend's account of her London  termination, an English nurse asking her sternly, insistently, why she cried as she lay on her post operative bed. "I told her that I was, yes, I was. Yes, but  it would pass. The sun, piercing the Venetian blinds made blinding  wavering bars on the counterpane, the strange London accents carried on the breeze through the open window. I remember that." And she, though lost in blackest sorrowing for a period when she returned, told me that she never regretted that decision, never quite knew if it was the sense of exile, the catastrophic hormone drop,  her body's mourning  for what had been surrendered, that made her cry so bitterly.

I wonder if we might perhaps untether Galway, let it go. Send all the crazies, the elitists, the mealy mouthed hypocrites there, to have the Catholic/paternalistic/witless country  they are due.. Offer any pregnant woman who wants to take a chance that chance. And we might live in the struggling here and now, our laws supportive of the terrible and unavoidable decision we each must make to live.


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