They Let Her Die

Access to abortion saves lives, writes Abortion Rights Secretary Davinia Hamilton

Izabela: that was the name of the 30-year-old woman who was left to die by doctors and midwives in Poland last September.

She was 22 weeks pregnant when she died of septic shock, after being denied an abortion for an non-viable pregnancy. The death was confirmed by Izabela’s family on November 1, and it is the first reported death linked to last year’s constitutional tribunal ruling which banned abortion in Poland in the case of fatal foetal abnormalities. 

The ruling means that doctors in Poland are bound by law to wait for a foetus with no chance of survival to die in the womb before they can intervene. 

An abortion would have saved Izabela’s life. 

I write this post with anguish guiding my hand. Anguish, and anger too, as I keep coming back to the fact that Izabela’s death was entirely avoidable, and that this woman’s life is a sacrifice on the altar of conservative moral ideology. 

All too often, when people ‘debate’ abortion, they are not thinking about the real lives of the real people affected by abortion restrictions and bans. They are speaking from a place of moral indignation which fails to understand that life, in practice, is messy and complicated and almost never reducible to the binary of right and wrong. 

And the very real effect of this moral indignation is this: a 30-year old woman, with her whole life ahead of her, is now dead. Her husband and daughter have had their loved one taken away from them, for absolutely no reason.

This death is not a one-off. It recalls the high-profile case of Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic miscarriage in Ireland in 2012, after doctors refused her a life-saving abortion. It recalls the case of Valentina Milluzzo, a 32-year-old woman who died of sepsis  in Italy in 2016, after being denied a life-saving abortion by a doctor who claimed to be a conscientious objector. It recalls the case of a 14-year-old girl, known as J.S.P – a survivor of rape who died in childbirth in Paraguay in 2018, as a result of the country’s draconian abortion laws.

It also recalls the case of Marion Mifsud Mora, who narrowly escaped with her life in 2014. She had been on holiday in Malta, the only EU country to completely ban abortion in all circumstances, when her waters broke prematurely at 17 weeks of pregnancy. Doctors refused to give her a life-saving abortion, telling her that her life was “in God’s hands”, and that “miracles do happen”, even though the foetus had no chance of survival and Marion was suffering from sepsis. Her life was saved when her insurance company’s emergency evacuation team airlifted her out of Malta, to find her emergency healthcare elsewhere. 

When we say that abortion saves lives, we are not being provocative – we are telling the truth. Cases like these are the reason that Abortion Rights exists, and the reason that we will continue to fight until every single person who needs an abortion can have one freely and safely and legally – no matter who they are or where in the world they live. 

Each one of us, regardless of race, age, nationality, gender, sexuality, ability, class background or history, deserves access to life-saving healthcare. We deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. We deserve the right to decide what happens to our bodies. We deserve to be the authors of our own lives.

Abortion Rights will keep campaigning for this. We encourage you to join us, and to get involved in this issue that affects every single one of us.