“Heartbeat” laws not only eliminate most abortions, they also dehumanize anyone with a uterus into a “host body”, a term that Jose Oliva, then Florida House Speaker, brought into national prominence.
The most infamous case of reducing a human being to a “host body” is that of Savita Halappanavar, whose ordeal helped overturn the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. The Eighth Amendment, which gave a “right to life” to embryo and fetus, had passed by referendum in 1983 with 67% support. Then, in 2018, the country voted by 66.4 to 33.6% to remove the amendment, with over two million votes cast. At 64.5%, the turnout was one of the highest ever recorded for a referendum in Ireland .
This is the case that helped galvanize the forces for abortion rights in Ireland. On Oct. 21, 2012, Savita Halappanavar, 17 weeks pregnant, appeared at University Hospital Galway complaining of back pain. She was discharged without diagnosis. She returned later that same day, saying that she felt pressure lower in her abdomen. This time, examination showed that the gestational sac was protruding from her body. It was determined that miscarriage and death of the fetus was unavoidable, and she was admitted to the hospital. Several hours later her water broke, and still she did not expel the fetus. The requests that she and her husband made for an abortion were repeatedly denied, as Irish law at that time forbade abortion if a fetal heartbeat was still present. Over and over, the hospital checked for fetal heartbeat and neglected Savita’s wellbeing. Finally, weakened, sickened, and in pain, she was somehow able to expel the fetus. It was too late. By the time she was put into the ICU, her sepsis was irreversible. She died of cardiac arrest early in the morning of Oct 28.
Savita’s ordeal was not an accidental outcome. The intention of “heartbeat” laws, one of which was in effect in Ireland at the time, is to support the embryo or fetus over everything else.
Heartbeat laws accomplish their goal in two ways. First, it is easy to detect a cardiac pulse or heartbeat, whereas it is next to impossible to predict who is going live and who is going to die. But more important are differing consequences. If Savita’s doctors had aborted the fetus while its heart was still beating, they might have faced life in prison. Allowing Savita to die, on the other hand, was a matter of malpractice, something handled by insurance.*
In fact, Savita’s husband, Praveen Halappanavar, who had stayed by his wife's side through all her misery, stayed as close as the hospital would allow,, sued the hospital. He was awarded an undisclosed amount.
Thank you Praveen Halappanavar!
On the other side of the world, is another infamous case of a human being who was reduced to to “host body”, that paralleled millions of others who never got any publicity.
In 2002 when K.L. was 17 years old, she found out that she was 14 weeks pregnant and received a fetal anomaly diagnosis of anencephaly, a disorder in which the embryo or fetus lacks at least a major portion of the brain, and rarely lives for a few days after birth and even more commonly does not even make it through the pregnancy. Physicians informed K.L. that continuing the pregnancy could endanger her health and maybe even her life. They recommended termination. Even though abortion is legal for therapeutic reasons in Peru, K.L. was denied access to an abortion by the hospital director and was compelled to carry the pregnancy to term. The baby survived for four days after birth, and K.L. breastfed during that time. This case made it to Peru’s Supreme Court where K.L. was monetarily compensated for the cruelty she endured.
Even the U.N. got involved.
When the Committee made its decision, it marked the first time that a UN human rights body held a government accountable for failing to ensure access to legal abortion services. The Committee stated that Peru had violated the victim’s rights under several articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) including the right to an effective remedy, prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, right to private life and right of minors to measures of protection.
After her ordeal K.L became an activist for reproductive rights.
…… K.L. has become a feminist icon in Peru and her story has helped to motivate reproductive rights activists in the country. Her bravery and willingness to challenge an arbitrary and unjust system has led to significant change and improved the ability of millions of women throughout the world to access reproductive services. Despite the ordeal she went through, K.L. had never received an apology for the suffering she was forced to undergo. On March 5th, 12 years after the judgement and 18 years after her traumatic ordeal, she was finally afforded that opportunity when the government of Peru issued K.L. an official and public apology.
Prior to the public apology, the Minister of Justice had a closed-door meeting with K.L. in which he asked her what would be the most important thing for her to hear from him. This was her chance to finally receive the recognition of the personal pain and trauma she was forced to undergo. But instead of focusing on her story, she told the minister that she wanted him talk about the way that Peru violates women’s human rights when they are denied abortion care as she was. She wanted him to acknowledge that it is the responsibility of the state to ensure that the law exists in practice and not just theory. And she assured him that for her, this apology is just the beginning. The end will only occur once the Protocol to Access Legal Abortion (the Protocol), developed by the government as a direct result of her case, is fully implemented.
Thank you K.L.!
As the abortion issue heats up, FiveThirtyEight is reporting that support for abortion rights has increased since the Texas Law.
Throughout most of 2021, Trump voters were actually more likely than Biden voters to say that abortion is a “very important” issue to them. That matched the long history of abortion opponents rating the issue as more important than its proponents. But, as the chart above shows, this pattern was dramatically reversed after Texas’s abortion ban went into effect. Averaged across the five weekly surveys conducted by The Economist/YouGov since then, 51 percent of Biden backers rated abortion as a very important issue compared with just 39 percent of Trump supporters. Morning Consult’s polling shows that the share of Democratic women who said issues such as abortion, contraception and equal pay are central when voting for federal office nearly doubled immediately after Texas’s ban.
Whether Democrats continue prioritizing abortion will inevitably depend in large part on how the Supreme Court rules next year on the constitutionality of a Mississippi statute that bars most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. ….. Any increased importance of abortion to Democratic voters, then, will likely be a boon to the party’s unlikely chances of retaining its slim congressional majorities after the 2022 midterm elections.
No matter what the Trumpified Supreme Court decides, here’s hoping we feminists keep fighting hard to maintain everyone’s status as human beings and succeed in preventing the Trump GOP from creating a caste of “host bodies”.
*For an explanation of how the situation in Texas is even worse than it was in Ireland at the time of Savita’s death, see the video by Mama Doctor Jones, a Texas ob/gyn.