Twitter, if I may: a personal thread on #RepealTheEighth from a non-Irish person.
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I thought of her, when my son was born, just as I thought of Savita Halappanavar. And I thought of them both even more when, less than 24 hours after I was released from hospital, the visiting midwife saw that my newborn son was sick with an infection and sent us straight back.
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We stayed a week in hospital. My son was put on IV antibiotics, his veins so small it took countless attempts to fit the gauge. He ended up with IVs in his feet. In another era - even a few decades earlier - he might easily have died.
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My son was born with a true knot in his umbilical cord; this, too, might have killed him. Even in the modern world, one in ten babies with a true knot in their cord dies as a result of it. Such a small thing, a small unsolveable thing, and yet the 'what if' remains frightening.
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Because I was PROMS, my son contracted an infection and needed antibiotics for a week. Because I was PROMS, I contracted an infection, too. But unlike his, mine wasn't caught at the outset. Mine lingered for weeks of unease and illness until I was wracked with fever.
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Back to hospital I went, and my son with me. I had my own, vile week on IV antibiotics, sick and feverish and miserable. My temperature was so high, they sat a fan by the bedside and refused to give me anything other than a thin sheet to help keep it low.
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And all the while, I thought; modern medicine - antibiotics - is the only thing that stood between both me and my son dying, like so many other women and children have died in history, of simple infections contracted during birth.
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That infection I caught? It was never identified. And I've never been fully healthy since. I have a constant baseline inflammatory problem as a result of it, my immune system over-responding constantly to every tiny illness, making me sicker, longer, and weaker in between.
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I cannot think about the birth of my child without also thinking about Savita Halappanavar; and though I love my son dearly - though I wouldn't trade him for anything - it's impossible not to remember that carrying him, bearing him, has damaged my health, perhaps forever.
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So often, when men talk archly about the sanctity of the unborn, they do so as if there's no cost to pregnancy, not really, because Medicine; or worse still, as though women are wrong to flinch from that cost, because pain in childbirth was Eve's punishment for the apple.
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And then they wonder, these men, why the old women they thought conservatives and the middle-aged women they thought matriarchs and the young women they thought docile - they wonder why women, why anyone with a uterus, would dare support abortion.
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And the answer comes back, through time and space, in the ancient triple-voice of the Maiden, the Mother, the Crone: because we have dominion over our bodies, not you. Because our lives are formed of wellbeing, not just existence. Because you cannot choose for us.
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Because pregnancy and childbirth always, ALWAYS carry the risk of death, of permanent damage or injury, and that MATTERS. Because the choice exists to be made, and removing one option completely doesn't change that - it just means you've chosen for everyone.
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