Parents of woman who died when Irish doctors refused to perform abortion meet with Indian government to demand justice

• Savita Halappanavar, 31, was found to be miscarrying when she was admitted to Galway University Hospital
• The dentist, who was 17 weeks pregnant, was denied a medical termination, and died from septicaemia on October 28
• Indian officials have promised parents Anadappa and Akka Mahadevi Yalgi all possible help
• Pro-choice campaigners plan mass rallies in Ireland calling for abortion to be legalised
  

By Rebecca Seales

Published: 14:53 EDT, 16 November 2012 | Updated: 16:49 EDT, 17 November 2012

The parents of an Indian woman who died of blood poisoning after Irish doctors refused her an abortion have met officials to demand justice for their daughter.

Savita Halappanavar, 31, was 17 weeks pregnant when she began miscarrying, and died of septicaemia a week later.

Her husband Praveen Halappanavar, 34, has told how he begged doctors at Galway University Hospital to terminate the pregnancy, but they refused to do so because she was ‘in a Catholic country’ and the foetus’s heartbeat was still present.

The tragedy has provoked soul searching in the Republic of Ireland, where abortion is illegal, as well as considerable anger in some quarters.

Campaigners are demanding a change in the law to allow abortion in the case where the mother’s life is in danger.

Savita’s parents Anadappa Yalgi, 62, and his wife Akka Mahadevi Yalgi, 54, met with municipal government officials late on Friday afternoon at the family home in Belgaum, South West India.

The grieving couple asked Belgaum’s Deputy Commissioner, Anbu Kumar, to help ensure every possible assistance from the Indian government.

Mr Kumar said of the encounter: ‘I visited the house and offered our government’s help where possible.’

A photo of Savita now hangs in the family home covered in a garland, as is traditional in India’s Hindu community after the death of a loved one.

Echoing comments made by her parents, India’s ambassador to Ireland said today that Mrs Halappanavar might still be alive today if she had been treated in India.

Debashish Chakravarti told RTÉ radio that he hoped the Irish government would take steps to ensure the circumstances which led to her death never arose again. 

Abortion is not illegal in India when the mother’s life is at risk, the ambassador noted.

Meanwhile Ireland’s ambassador to India, Feilim McLaughlin, was officially summoned by the Delhi government on Friday to discuss an inquiry into Mrs Halappanavar’s death.

Madhusudan Ganapathi, secretary (west) in the external affairs ministry, told the Irish envoy he hoped the inquiry into the tragedy would be independent.

He also conveyed the sadness felt by people in India as ‘a young life had come to an untimely end’.

India’s External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said of the tragedy: “Saving the life of the mother is of prime importance, if you can’t save the life of the child.”

Mr Halappanavar, Savita’s husband, has described how he held her hand as she died.

Reliving her final moments, he said: ‘In the night, at around one o’clock, the nurse came running, as I was standing outside ICU.

‘She just told me to be brave, and she took me near Savita, and she said: “Will you be OK to be there, living her last minutes?

‘I said: “Yes, I want to”. I was holding her hand, they were trying to pump her heart, there was a big team around. The doctor just told me they lost her.’

Mr Halappanavar, who works as an engineer at Boston Scientific in Galway, came to Ireland from India with his wife four years ago to start a new life together. She had a job in Westport, Co Mayo and the pair lived in Galway city.

Happy couple: Savita and her husband Praveen dancing at 2010 Diwali festival in Galway, video from YouTube

They were so excited about the expected birth of their first child, which was due on March 20, that they had an early baby shower in recent weeks when Mrs Halappanavar’s parents were visiting.

Pro-choice activists in Ireland have turned to social media networks to organise a mass protest against the country’s abortion laws on Saturday.

A rally in central Dublin is expected to attract several thousand demonstrators, and follows similar rallies on Thursday night in Belfast and on Friday in Derry.

BOOK OF THE WEEK  

Before the light fades: a memoir of grief and resistance

by Natasha Walter (Virago £18.99, 256pp)

Natasha Walter had heard her mother say, ‘When the time comes, I will kill myself’ so many times that she’d stopped listening.

It seemed inconceivable that Ruth Oppenheim, a cheerful old lady in her 70s, who lived life to the full and adored her children and grandchildren, could ever carry out such a clinically final act. But Ruth meant it.

In 2017, she gathered the whole family to lunch at her house in Watford, Hertfordshire, not letting on a thing. 

A few days later, she met up with Natasha beside the canal at King’s Cross in London for a normal, chatty lunch in an Indian restaurant.

Natasha had no idea this would be the last time she would ever see her mother. Four days later, Ruth took her own life.

She left a note for her daughters to circulate among her friends, explaining: ‘I decided to do so [kill herself] this year while I am still happy but very aware of my fading memory and health.’

Thus Natasha found herself in a state of profound grief mixed with crushing guilt.

Yes, she had noticed her mother was becoming a bit more frail, nervous and forgetful, but she’d cheerfully batted away her fears.

‘If I’d been a better daughter all my life,’ she writes, ‘less ready to push away her concerns, maybe she would not have felt so alone that she decided to die alone.’

In this succinct and deeply serious memoir, Natasha relives the days and weeks after her mother’s death.

At first, she tried to carry on as usual, doing her emotionally demanding job of running a charity for refugees.

But she felt ‘unshelled, a little scuttling mollusc without armour’. She broke down and had to take six weeks off, during which she tried yoga, running, swimming and gardening to smother her guilt and depression. None of them worked.

The yoga did not clear her mind. The running hurt her knees. With the swimming, she found she was just ‘dragging her misery up and down the pool’.

To have any hope of getting to the bottom of her mother’s mindset and coming to terms with her death, she needed to dig into Ruth’s life story. And that’s the essence of this compelling book.

Ruth’s German parents, Eva and Georg Oppenheim, were Jewish refugees. Eva, a promising young pianist, had escaped from anti-Semitic Hamburg in 1933 by getting a job as a housemaid to a bossy couple in London’s Blackheath.

Georg, a Nazi-resisting young Communist lawyer, had been imprisoned by the German regime and kept in solitary confinement for a year. 

Released in 1936, he’d smuggled himself into Poland on a coal train and managed to get papers to travel to England just before war broke out.

In London, he met and married Eva. After being interned for a year, separated from each other on the Isle of Man, the couple lived in poverty in a flat in North London, where Ruth was born in 1942.

What this book demonstrates fascinatingly is how children react against their parents. 

Eva and Georg, by now sick of rebellion and resistance, turned themselves into a conventional suburban family, living in a dull, tidy house.

The father who’d once bravely stood up to the Nazis was furious with his daughter when she was arrested aged 19 during a protest against nuclear weapons.

Many years later, Ruth would watch her parents die of Alzheimer’s and cancer, her mother screaming in hospital. 

That didn’t endear her to the prospect of allowing the British medical system to determine the manner of her own eventual death.

Natasha’s evocations of the 1960s Ban The Bomb marches Ruth went on bring back the fervour of those early years of non-violent resistance: the fledgling campaigners for nuclear disarmament did things like expose the government’s secret underground nuclear bunker, from where they intended to carry on running the country after the nuclear apocalypse. 

Ruth was, by her own admission, ‘bloody-minded’ in her persistence. She knew from her own Jewish background, Natasha writes, ‘that the journey from normality to apocalypse can be fast’.

Ruth met her future husband on one of those marches; he would spend time in prison after interrupting a church service in Brighton during the Labour Party conference of 1967.

Dressed in anorak and sandals, with no make-up or bra, Ruth seemed quite an embarrassing parent for young Natasha growing up.

There was a sign on the family fridge saying: ‘Boring women have clean houses.’ Natasha rebelled against this in turn, getting a job at Vogue and briefly luxuriating in the world of high fashion.

When she came home with a coveted pair of Eau De Nil slingbacks, her mother’s reaction was: ‘But you have shoes’ — one pair was quite enough. 

But the strong strain of radicalism in the family passed from one generation to the other and Natasha soon left Vogue.

It wasn’t long after her mother’s death that Natasha took part in her first Extinction Rebellion sit-down protest, blocking a street near Trafalgar Square, linking arms in a metal pipe with another protester.

She describes the euphoria and exhilaration of that day (not mentioning the members of the public who might have been trying to get to hospital or their own mother’s funeral).

A policeman cut the metal piping and carried her off to a police cell. ‘But in order to be myself, to live a more honest life, I need to do the little I can do,’ she writes. She has given up her car.

The more Natasha contemplates her mother’s life, the more her death makes sense.

‘I could see that she was someone who could confront when others shied away.

‘Someone who hated denial. Someone who wanted to live an honest and uncompromised life . . . and in the end, that desire extended even to the manner of her death, so that the way she chose to die was somehow of a piece with the way she chose to live.’

Indian villagers have exposed the laughable quality of roads built under an Indian government project by rolling up the edges of the street like carpet. 

In an astounding clip posted to social media, four men are seen squatting by the side of the road in a village in the Jalna district of India‘s Maharashtra state. 

At first glance it looks as though they are attempting to fold a grey rug of some sort, but the camera quickly pans out to show the villagers are in fact tugging at what was supposed to be newly-laid tarmac leading out of the village.

The camera then zooms in to show the pitiful layers of material resembling bitumen, which appeared to have been slapped on top of a large piece of cloth to cover the existing dirt road like a plaster over a wound. 

Indian outlets Times Now and the Pune Mirror reported that the villagers went on to slam the contractors for what they described as ‘bogus’ work.

‘This is all bogus work being carried out in the name of ”development”,’ one was quoted as saying. 

Meanwhile, some 1,500 kilometres away on the other side of the country in the Bhagalpur district, Bihar, locals watched on in horror as a huge bridge spectacularly collapsed into the Ganges river below.

In 2000, the Indian government launched an initiative called the Prime Minister’s Village Road Scheme (PMGSY).

The intention was to construct a network of all-weather roads to link rural villages across India, thereby improving connectivity and encouraging industrialisation, urbanisation and social mobility. 

The scheme, which is still ongoing, claims to have laid some 808,000 kilometres of rural roads in the past two decades. 

It was initially fully funded by the government, but in recent years the funding was reduced and states were forced to shoulder some of the financial burden.

Many social media users speculated that state officials had skimped on quality, giving cheap contracts to low bidders and pocketing the difference. Others meanwhile simply poked fun at the shoddy workmanship. 

‘Is it a road? Is it a carpet?’ one wrote, while another chipped in: Very good technology! This is called factory-made Road! Just dispatched the required quantity of rolls at the site, unroll it and all is done!’

A third wrote: ‘Wherever there is ‘ruling party’ government, there is only loot and corruption!’

The Maharashtra Rural State Road Development Agency later hit back, asserting that they had employed ‘innovative construction technology’ to ensure the longevity and durability of the roads, according to The Hindustan Times.

An agency official reportedly said the villagers’ attempt to remove the ‘stress-absorbing membrane interface layer’ occurred while the roadwork was still in progress. 

But authorities in Bihar may not be able to tell the same story.

The Aguwani-Sultanganj bridge, which measures more than three kilometres in length, unceremoniously imploded and crashed into the Ganges river.

The incredible structure was undergoing construction, having already collapsed once last November. 

National Disaster Response teams are conducting a search for one guard who was reported missing in the wake of the incident.

One worker was killed in the previous collapse. 

Incredible footage from the riverbank showed locals watching on in stunned silence as the collapsing concrete sprayed water dozens of metres into the air. 

The state’s chief minister Nitish Kumar has ordered a probe into the incident and has vowed to discover those responsible for the structural failure. 

Indian man who was pierced in chest with 6-foot IRON ROD after his car tyre bursts miraculously survives after it misses his heart by HALF a centimetre

• Hardeep Singh, 42, was driving when car tyre burst and car went into a barrier 
• The crash sent a six-foot long and four-inch thick rod through Hardeep’s chest
• Doctors were able to remove the rod after a nearly five-hour operation 
• They said rod missed his heart by half a centimetre, did not impact vital organs 
• WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT 

By David Averre For Mailonline

Published: 10:19 EDT, 16 August 2021 | Updated: 10:32 EDT, 16 August 2021