Assumptions, Omissions, and Definitions

Twitter can be trying at the best of times, but Irish Twitter has been especially so of late, most notably in the aftermath of Savita Halappanavar’s death and in connection with the government’s expert group report on A, B, and C v Ireland. 

The constant linking of these issues, based on the unproven assumption that Savita died because she was denied a termination of pregnancy, has been particularly frustrating. As Kitty Holland, the journalist who broke this story, has admitted, it has not been established that Savita’s situation would have been helped in any respect by a pre-term delivery.

Indeed, given how Savita’s husband Praveen describes how Savita requested a termination, it’s far from certain that such a termination would have been legal even in Britain. 

Contrary to inaccurate reports in the Irish Times, it is simply not true that British doctors are “legally able to carry out abortions until the 24th week of a pregnancy for all reasons, not just medical”. Rather, the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act remains in force, with the 1967 Abortion Act providing a limited number of defences for doctors who carry out abortions. 

It is not clear that Savita’s situation would have been covered by these defences, as we simply do not know whether termination would have been necessary to prevent grave permanent damage to Savita's health, or indeed whether it would have been more risky for Savita to have continued with the pregnancy than to have ended it. The facts of this case just aren't known.

That’s not to say that a termination wouldn’t have been granted in Britain were someone in Savita’s situation to ask for one, merely that such a termination might not have been legal. 

It would, in any case, have been up to the doctors present to decide, as even in Britain requesting a procedure does not grant a right to it.

Bulverism ahoy!

Annoying too has been the absurd Bulverism that’s gone on. ‘Bulverism’ was C.S. Lewis’s term for the tendency of people to dismiss others' arguments by saying something along the lines of ‘Oh, you only believe that because you’re a Communist/Environmentalist/whatever,’and to assume that such dismissals constitute refutations. 

Clearly related to the fifth and thirty-second of Schopenhauer’s 38 Ways to Win an Argument, this is a variety of ad hominem wholly devoid of intellectual credibility. The most common variety of this at the moment seems to be one which asserts that people only hold their beliefs about protecting life or helping the poor or protesting against the death penalty or whatever because they’re Catholic fundamentalists or something similarly oxymoronic*.

Generally speaking, Catholics tend to argue for moral issues from a natural law standpoint, rooted in philosophy and reason without reference to revelation, rather than from a faith-based one. It’s almost invariably their opponents who introduce religion into discussions.

It’s particularly bizarre to see the strain of Bulverism that gets deployed when members of Ireland’s Iona Institute are on telly. People mutter en masse about how Breda O’Brien or Patricia Casey only believe what they do because they are members of the Iona Institute and are only on telly because they are members of the Iona Institute.

Now. A moment's serious though should banish both of these objections. Firstly, it’s surely a bit more likely that people are members of the Iona Institute because of what they believe than they have their beliefs because of their membership, isn’t it? I think it’s pretty easy to establish that, say, Patricia Casey had opinions before the Iona Institute was founded in 2007. And I’m pretty sure that Breda O’Brien, say, was appearing on television long before the Iona Institute was set up, given that she’s been a columnist for the Irish Times for more than a decade, and was one with the Sunday Business Post before that.

If people have issues with what Iona Institute members or patrons say, then they should tackle that, because we all have an interest in honesty and accuracy; I’m glad that some people do adopt such a grown-up approach on occasion, questioning statistics and so forth, but sadly this seems all too rare. 

Listening to all the voices…

I think part of the problem may be due to a general lack of awareness about broadcasters’ obligations towards balance, such that they can't just put up a panel of sheep to bleat in unison, but have to find people who can and will express views that challenge fashionable orthodoxies. They can be desperate for people who'll do that.

So here’s the question: if you’re a broadcaster, and you’re in need of people who are willing and able to argue that, say, it’s best, all things being equal, for children to be raised by a mother and a father, or why human life should be protected at all stages, no matter how vulnerable, who are you going to call?

Believe it or not, lots of people hold such views, as surveys and referendum results constantly show, but habitually keep their heads down because they get shouted down if they voice them. A friend of mine is of the view that Irish politics tends to be dominated by conservative voices, but the Irish media – and social media – tend to be dominated by liberal ones, and I think she has a point. If we want to have a healthy society, we need to be willing to listen to all the voices out there, even if some of them challenge our preconceptions and make us uncomfortable. 

And let’s not go down the road of claiming that people shouldn’t be on television because they’re not elected – as I've seen people saying often over the last fortnight – unless you want the only people on television to be TDs, Senators, county councillors, and the President. Of course, people tend only to make such claims about unelected people they disagree with. Unelected ones they agree with are fine. 

(It's a bit like the phenomenon where people say religion should never have an influence on politics, but tend not to be bothered about how religion motivated the politics of William Wilberforce, Sophie Scholl, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, and Jerzy Popiełuszko.)

Yes, I know pro-lifers are guilty of nonsense too – this headline infuriated me when it was brought to my attention, as hysteria helps nobody and it annoys me enormously when facts are strained to fit narratives, but it seems to me – and I follow a pretty diverse cohort of people – that at the moment it’s certainly the pro-choicers who are by far the more guilty party. 

A second criterion…

One thing that’s amazed me about the whole debate is how people on both sides argue about legislating for the Supreme Court’s 1992 ‘X’ decision without engaging with the fact that the Supreme Court laid down two requirements for abortion to be legal in Ireland. Pro-choicers talk about how the Court ruled that the Constitution allows for abortion when there is a real and substantial risk to a mother’s life, while pro-lifers contest the validity of the judgement and such things. Neither group seems to be engaging with what the Court said, and it was a huge relief for me to see yesterday that the Expert Group's report on A, B, and C v Ireland had clearly recognised that both criteria need to be taken into account.

The Expert Group’s report notes that in 1992, 

“A majority of the members of the Supreme Court held that if it were established as a matter of probability, that there was a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother and that this real and substantial risk could only be averted by the termination of her pregnancy, such a termination was lawful.”

There are two requirements here for abortion to be legal in Ireland. The first is that there should be – as a matter of probability – a real and substantial risk to a mother’s life. The second – and this is the one that people tend not to acknowledge – is that termination of pregnancy should be the only way of averting this risk.

The only way. This means that if there’s any another conceivable way of averting risk, abortion is not permitted under the Constitution. Here’s the crucial passage from Chief Justice Finlay’s 1992 decision on X:

"I therefore conclude that the proper test to be applied is that if it is established as a matter of probability that there is a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother, which can only be avoided by the termination of her pregnancy, such termination is permissible, having regard to the true interpretation of Article 40.3.3˚ of the Constitution.”

Dancing round the Constitution…

Now, plenty of people seem to think that Ireland’s politicians have sat on their hands over this issue for the last twenty years, though as the Expert Group’s report shows, and as Noel Whelan wrote recently in the Irish Times, “The pattern could be more correctly described as spurts of intense activity followed by years of acute sluggishness.”

The fact is that the Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t give politicians a lot of leeway for legislation, as legislation would probably be unconstitutional if it allowed for abortion in cases where a mother’s life is endangered but did not rule out abortion in cases where there might conceivably be other ways of saving a mother’s life.

Given the constraints of the Constitution, I don’t envy the Government working out how to comply with the European Court of Human Rights’ wish that they realise an accessible and effective procedure to enable pregnant women to establish whether they qualify for a lawful termination of pregnancy in accordance with Irish law. 

That said, I think the Expert Group’s advice is a reasonable start, though whether the Government will pick from the options the group presents, or come up with something else, remains to be seen. 

It’s interesting that the report implicitly disagrees with the Supreme Court’s willingness in 1992 to accept the recommendations of a clinical psychologist as evidence that a patient could be suicidal, insisting that the opinion of psychiatrists is imperative in such matters. This makes sense, as if under certain conditions abortion is to be considered a medical procedure, then it is only fitting that it should be for medical practicioners to decide whether it is necessary or not.

My inexpert feeling about this is that as proposed, this could be okay, and it's conceivable that the government could come up with a mechanism that prioritises the lives of women while also vindicating the lives of unborn human beings. 

To make sure this works effectively within the Constitution, however, I think they'll need to make sure the review procedures for decisions to terminate should be as clear as for decisions to refuse terminations, and I think it'd be wise to to ensure that legislation precludes doctors who have any financial interest in abortions being granted from having a say in these decisions. 

That might sound cynical, but as February's revelations about gender-based abortions in British abortion clinics showed, we cannot assume that doctors will always be paragons of integrity. We don't assume this about politicians, policemen, priests, or plumbers, after all. Or journalists.

Wordplay? Or just the recognition that some things aren’t simple?

Of course, making matters messier is the fact that terminology is so tricky in these matters. Pro-choicers sometimes accuse pro-lifers of playing word games on these things, and insist that abortion is clearly defined in the dictionary and as a medical term, but the fact is that language changes and words vary in meaning. Dictionaries merely describe what words mean at a given time, and often in a given place and to a given people. These things are not fixed.

Currently the Oxford English Dictionary defines abortion as follows:

“The expulsion or removal from the womb of a developing embryo or fetus, spec.(Med.) in the period before it is capable of independent survival, occurring as a result either of natural causes (more fully spontaneous abortion) or of a deliberate act (more fully induced abortion); the early or premature termination of pregnancy with loss of the fetus; an instance of this. 

In more general use the unmodified word generally refers to induced abortion, whether caused by drugs or performed surgically, and the term miscarriage is used for spontaneous abortion.”

Does this settle things? Well, maybe, though by the primary definition it seems to suggest that it’s nonsense to speak of abortion being illegal; if it’s a naturally-occurring process, the law’s no more capable of preventing it than it is of prohibiting avalanches. It’s striking that this 2009 definition doesn’t speak of abortion of something which is done with the intention of destroying the child in utero, but merely as something that leads to the loss of the child. It’s very general. 

But here’s the thing. In 1989, the OED defined abortion rather differently:

“The act of giving untimely birth to offspring, premature delivery, miscarriage; the procuring of premature delivery so as to destroy offspring. (In Med. abortion is limited to a delivery so premature that the offspring cannot live, i.e. in the case of the human foetus before the sixth month.)”

So, apparently in 1989, there was no such thing, from a medical viewpoint, of abortion from the sixth month of pregnancy on; any termination of a child in the womb after that point wasn’t abortion. No, I have no idea what it was. Also, apparently,in non-medical usage the word ‘abortion’could be used in 1989 for either natural miscarriage or premature delivery – in which case the child might live! 

And, of course, in 1989 the OED recognised that abortion could refer to the intentional destruction of preborn offspring. This definition seems to have disappeared. Nowadays the OED doesn’t acknowledge that the purpose of what it calls ‘induced abortion’ can be – and of course often is – to destroy an unborn child. It now omits intention entirely, focusing solely on effect.

Confused? You should be. Words change, and dictionaries change with them. The word ‘abortion’, after all, is derived from the Latin for‘miscarriage’, so it’s hardly surprising that the terms should be confused. It first appears in English, for what it’s worth, in a 1537 translation of Erasmus, which says:

“To the phisicians craf he oweth his lyfe, ye whiche as yet hath nat receiued life, whyle thrugh it abortions be prohibeted.”

Abortions were prohibited in the physicians’ craft in the early sixteenth century, so. Presumably that didn’t mean that natural miscarriages were illegal. Not that that gets us very far. What about nowadays?

Hardly surprising that the Pro-Life Campaign isn't totally opposed to abortion...

The OED isn't a medical dictionary, of course, and so it's worth taking a look at Stedman's medical dictionary, which describes abortion as follows:

"Expulsion from the uterus of an embryo or fetus before viability (20 weeks' gestation [18 weeks after fertilization] or fetal weight less than 500 g). A distinction made between abortion and premature birth is that premature infants are those born after the stage of viability but before 37 weeks' gestation. Abortion may be either spontaneous (occurring from natural causes) or induced (artificially or therapeutically)."

Medically, then, it seems that the natural expulsion of infants from the womb is abortion, assuming they're below a certain age or weight, but the deliberate destruction of a human being within the womb is not abortion as long as the child is at least twenty weeks old.  

But, of course, English dictionaries – medical or otherwise – are descriptive things, not prescriptive ones; they tell us how people use words, not how people should use words, and the reality is that medical views on these things differ.

It’s well worth reading the 2000 report from the All Party Oireachtas Committee on Abortion, which recognised that the Ireland's Pro-Life Campaign isn't entirely opposed to abortion but is, rather, opposed to abortions in the sense in which term is colloquially used. Page 19 onwards shows just how unsatisfactory our terminology is on this issue, as the Committee reports:

• The then president of the Medical Council saying that abortion is not mentioned in Medical Council guidelines as it is, in practice, a lay term, though it has a technical medical meaning which relates to any termination of pregnancy, whether spontaneously or induced, prior to about fourteen weeks of the pregnancy.
• The then Master of the National Maternity Hospital saying that in the medical profession and in the clinical textbooks abortion has always been described as a pregnancy that is lost in the first trimester of pregnancy, which is up to fourteen weeks.
• The then Master of the Coombe Women’s hospital saying that the medical term ‘abortion’ means the premature ending of a pregnancy at any point before the foetus or baby is viable.
• The then Chairman of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists saying that medical treatments to save mothers’ lives are not generally referred to within the medical profession as abortions, even if unborn children should die as the result of such interventions; the terms ‘legal abortion’ and 'procured abortion', he said, refer specifically to situations where the intention is to take the life of the unborn.
• A consultant obstetrician gynaecologist recognising semantic change, ‘abortion’ having come to mean in both medical and lay usage the destruction of an embryo or foetus, and pointing out that the term is nowadays mostly used to mean the deliberate destruction of unborn human beings.

Even the euphemistic phrase ‘termination of pregnancy’ was acknowledged by the Committee as being ambiguous, as it was pointed out to it a pregnancy can be terminated by going into labour, every pregnancy eventually being terminated.

Anybody who thinks this is simple is kidding themselves. The Expert Group has presented its report to the Government, and now the Oireachtas has the job of coming up with a legally-supported mechanism that will fulfil the needs of the Constitution without going beyond the Constitution, and which will somehow make sense of the fact that doctors, lawyers, and laypeople can’t actually agree on what the word ‘abortion’ means.

Good luck with that.
________________________________________________________________
* True. Fundamentalism is, in its broadest sense, a Protestant movement that took its name from a series of books called The Fundamentals, which opposed liberal trends within Protestantism. At the heart of fundamentalism is the principle that the Bible is not merely inspired, but is inerrant, and is inerrant at the level of the very words used by the original Biblical authors, which pretty much demands a literal reading of Scripture.

These attitudes have spread beyond Protestantism, such that there are, of course, fundementalist Muslims. However, they are completely contrary to Catholicism, which has historically sought to read the Bible in a nuanced and layered way. No, really.

Publish and be damned

I wrote to the Irish Times about discrepancies in its reporting on the death of Savita Halappanavar; my letter's not been published, which is fair enough, so I thought I might as well post what I wrote, as I think it's probably worth giving a short and simple list of serious discrepancies:

Sir, 

Kitty Holland’s 24 November article,  ‘Are you okay… I think we are losing her’, seems to invite more questions than it answers about the tragic death of  Savita Halappanavar. 

Ms Holland says the hospital started Ms Halappanavar on antibiotics on Tuesday 23 October, but in an interview on the Irish Times website, Praveen Halappanavar tells Ms Holland that this happened on Sunday 21 October. 

Ms Holland says it was on Thursday 25 October that the hospital informed Mr Halappanavar that his wife had contracted e.coli ESBL, but in the website interview, Mr Halappanavar says he was told this on the morning of Friday 26 October. 

Ms Holland says that on Saturday 27 October the hospital considered putting Ms Halappanavar on dialysis, but in the website interview, Mr Halappanavar said that the hospital had already attempted this on Friday 26 October. 

RTE has published and broadcast a distinctly different timeline, purporting to come from Galway University Hospital, claiming that the hospital started Ms Halappanavar on antibiotics on Monday 22 October. RTE has also reported that Ms Halappanavar’s miscarriage took place spontaneously in theatre on Tuesday 23 October, rather than in the early afternoon of Wednesday 24 October, as reported in the Irish Times. 

I doubt I am alone in being confused by this affair, where even the most basic facts seem in dispute. 

Yours, etc,

I've seen people on Twitter asking when we stopped believing victims, and saying that they're tired of people claiming that the facts of what happened are unknown, but surely one thing the above shows is that the facts are most definitely in dispute.

On 'Coleman at Large' this evening, Kitty Holland admitted to Marc Coleman that there were problems with Praveen's account of things, and that there were differences between what he'd said when she'd originally interviewed him over the phone in India and then when she interviewed him again in Galway:

"All one can surmise is that his recollection of events -- the actual timeline and days -- may be a little muddled... we only have Praveen and his solicitor's take on what was in or not in the notes -- we're relying all the time on their take on what happened... Oh, I'm not satisfied of anything. I'm satisfied of what he told me, but I await as much as anyone else the inquiry and the findings. I can't tell for certain -- who knows what will come out in that inquiry? They may come back and say she came in with a disease she caught from something outside the hospital before she even arrived in, and there was no request for termination..."

Praveen has contradicted himself and changed his story several times, and the sequence of events as he describes them doesn't tally with that which purports to come from the hospital, and which you'd think the hospital ought to be able to substantiate.

That there are discrepancies in Praveen's account shouldn't surprise us, of course, given that the man spent a week watching his wife suffer and die -- distress, exhaustion, and trauma can lead to serious confusion, as horrible events all blur together.

But if the core structural facts are unclear, what credence should we place -- at the moment -- on any other details or claims? This is why I keep saying we have to wait, and is one of the reasons why I find the relentless linking of Savita's death to Ireland's law on abortion absolutely disgraceful. Doing this in the absence of facts and on the basis of a confused and contradictory narrative is at best lazily emotive, and at worst cynical and opportunistic.

There's also the fact that we have historically taken the line here of innocence till proven guilty; we don't believe victims straight off, and never have done. After speaking to victims -- and doing so sympathetically but not uncritically -- we always listen to the accused to find out their side of the story. 

And that, of course, has not been told.

Patience is a Virtue...

I'm a bit worried about the way things are developing regarding the Savita Hallapanavar story. Initially I was troubled by how pro-choicers seemed to be spinning a story markedly devoid of firm facts  in such a way that Savita Hallapanavar had been crowned in death as a martyr to political cowardice and Ireland's refusal to legislate for abortion; it's been the usual sheep who bleat about 'evidence-based reasoning' who've seemed most keen to shun evidence and reasoning in their eagerness to make spurious links on this one, dogmatically asserting that Savita died because of Catholicism and Ireland's abortion laws.

Now, though, I'm seriously bothered that pro-lifers might be so desperate to believe that her death had nothing to do with abortion that they leap on anything that supports their views. 

Yesterday, for instance, there was a letter in the Examiner which argued that Savita's death might have been due to an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria. 

This letter, from a Doctor J Clair, takes issue with how he believes the honour of the Irish medical profession has been impugned over the circumstances of Savita's death, which he thinks almost certainly had nothing to do with abortion:

"It appears to me that the problem was an unforeseen ESBL infection rather than an issue of obstetric mishandling.  

In my experience of over 30 years with clinical antibiotic use, ESBL antibiotic resistance is by far the most worrying development that I have experienced.  

The insult to the Irish medical service is added to by the suggestion that the Indian Embassy is upset with the lack of abortion services in Ireland. 

This insult is further compounded by the fact the Indian subcontinent has played a major role in the spread of ESBL positive organisms."

Now, I'm not going to say that this is implausible, and we have heard of similarly antibiotic-resistant viruses making their way here from India and thereabouts, but I don't see that there's any way Dr Clair could credibly identify this as the cause of Savita's deaths without having seen her charts, such that this, surely, is conjecture. If, on the other hand, he's saying this because he's seen her charts, then wouldn't this constitute some kind of breach of confidentiality?

Unfortunately, others are running with this. One Ruari McCallion has a guest piece on Mark Lambert's blog today in which he elaborates on what Dr Clair says. 

"Mrs Halappanavar died of an antibiotic-resistant infection, specifically e.coli ESBL. She did not die from an abortion, from being denied an abortion, from Catholic teaching or from a confused legal system in Ireland.  

[...] 

Getting information has been like pulling teeth. I cannot mention names or attribute their comments even to ‘a doctor/nurse/paramedic at x/y/z hospital/surgery/healthcare trust’. I can’t even mention the area they live and practice; they are frightened of being traced and found out. That could have been put down to the fear that they were passing on hearsay and gossip – but the same story has come from multiple sources. It passes the usual tests of corroboration."

Mark's a decent, intelligent, and level-headed bloke who will have posted this in absolute sincerity and with the best will in the world, and though I don't know Ruari at all, I have no reason to doubt his integrity, but no matter he believes or why, I think it's deeply imprudent to push this line. Indeed, I think it's imprudent even to embrace this thesis.

We know precious little about what happened in Galway: we know that Savita had a miscarriage and died of an infection some days later; we know that she was started on antibiotics at some point, though we don't know when as her husband Praveen has contradicted himself on this point and the hospital has given a third possible date for this; we know that Praveen's timeline of events seems to be utterly irreconcilable with one purporting to come from the hospital.

That's about all that we can say for certain. We can't make assertions about what happened. We can really only point to the discrepancies and ask questions. Just as pro-choicers shouldn't be jumping to the conclusion that Savita died because she was denied a termination of pregnancy or because of any supposed uncertainty in Irish law, neither should pro-lifers be asserting that she definitely didn't die for those reasons, and grabbing at the claim that she died because of some subcontinental superbug.

It may yet turn out that pro-lifers indeed have blood on their hands on this issue, but we just don't know.  

We have to wait until the investigations do their work, and yes, I know it looks as though the HSE one looks fatally hamstrung because Praveen refuses to cooperate with the investigation -- not allowing it access to Savita's medical records -- because he says it won't be independent and because he says "the HSE are the ones who messed up Savita's care", but still, we have to wait.

Any assertions on this issue must be either sheer conjecture or based on information most definitely absent from the public domain. We can ask questions -- and let's face it, we ought to, as our journalists aren't exactly doing their job on that front -- but given how little we know, there aren't that many questions that legitimately fall within the remit of the general public. Certainly, we shouldn't assert anything. Things are mysterious enough, and no matter how good our intentions might be, it is, I think, deeply irresponsible to add anything to the current confusion.

We need facts, not wishful thinking, and information, not conspiracy theories. 

We have to wait. 

Paper Doesn't Refuse Ink, as my Dad says

Warning: this post does not have an inverted pyramid structure. The middle matters. Lots.

There's an interesting and important article by Kitty Holland in today's Observer about the tragic story of Savita Hallapanavar's death, with the most important sentence in the piece being buried in the middle of it all:

"Whether the fact that Savita had been refused a termination was a factor in her death has yet to be established."

Why is this the most important sentence? Because that's the sentence that pulls the rug out from under the whole piece. Savita's death has been reported worldwide, with Kitty Holland being the reporter who broke the story, and in explaining the story in the Observer, Holland makes it clear that from her point of view this story was always about abortion.

Holland says that her contact in the West told her of a woman who'd died after repeatedly requesting a termination. She realised that this could be a story with enormous political and constitutional ramifications, as abortion is the most divisive issue in Ireland and, she believed, the death of a woman in these circumstances was probably inevitable given the lack of clarity in law. Holland tracked down and rang Savita's husband, Praveen, who told her the story...

It was published, and went global. There was a spontaneous protest outside the Oireachtas, with up to 2,000 people there, or so Holland says, though the Gardaí put the numbers at about 700, and RTE and Channel 4 had reported that the vigil was to be numbered in the hundreds. International attention increased, with Savita's parents being quoted as having accused Ireland of murdering their daughter.

"The pressure," she concludes, "for something to be done about the legal morass around abortion is greater than it has ever been – not only domestically but this time, it seems, from across the world. Praveen Halappanavar, a quiet-spoken, gentle young man who was so determined to tell me what happened to his young wife, may yet prove the loudest voice those seeking change here have ever had."

True. And yet as she admits in a single sentence buried in the middle of the column, this story may have nothing whatsoever to do with abortion.

'Never Again,' say the posters, 'Abortion rights now,' though a termination might not have saved Savita

Lessons in Journalism

The fact that it's buried in the middle is significant. Newspaper stories tend to be structured on the principle of an 'inverted pyramid', with the big stuff at the start and then stuff being decreasingly salient; a 'kicker' is frequently deployed at the end, to hammer home what the journalist sees as the key point.

People often read columns that way, after all. They look at the headline, read the first couple of paragraphs, skim down, and look at the last paragraph. I'm not sure if people read them that way because we realise they're written that way, or if they're written that way because we read them that way. I reckon it's a circular phenomenon, which is also handy for editors as it gives a general thumb on what to cut out for reasons of length.

Look at that piece again. The headline says that Savita Hallapanavar's death may stir Ireland to change over abortion. The first paragraph says that when Holland learned a woman had died after asking for a termination, she realised this could be a big story with massive political and constitutional ramifications. The second paragraph is all about abortion, and specifically says that the death of a woman in circumstances such as Savita's was probably inevitable given Ireland's laws. Then there are eleven paragraphs telling the story, before a final paragraph about abortion again.

And buried in the middle of the piece, in the eighth paragraph of fourteen, is the admission that the story may have nothing whatsoever to do with abortion.

How Little We Know...

Investigations have yet to take place into why Savita died. Not in the most straightforward sense, as we know she contracted E.Coli and septicaemia. Rather in the sense of when and how she contracted the infection that killed her, whether she was given the best healthcare possible, why exactly her request the pregnancy be ended was rejected, whether a termination would have saved her life or whether it might even have further endangered her.

We don't know any of this. Her medical charts are not in the public domain. These things are all about details and specifics, and those details and specifics have not been published. All we have to go on are the heartbroken words of a man who recently watched his wife die.

In the absence of the medical data, anybody -- even an obstetrician or gynaecologist, no matter how well qualified -- who insists that a termination would have saved Savita's life, or that it would definitely have endangered her further, is talking nonsense. Assertions in this matter are mere speculation, and conjecture, as a sensible pro-choice friend said to me yesterday, doesn't help.

We don't know if Savita died because she was denied the option of having a miscarrying pregnancy terminated. The head of Dublin's Rotunda Maternity Hospital says this case probably wasn't about abortion laws, and was almost certainly about how a clinical situation involving miscarriage-related infection was managed; whether different management of the situation might have saved Savita's life, he says, is something nobody can say. If we're honest we should admit that we know next to nothing about this. All we really have are questions.

A Couple of Questions

Not, of course, that you'd think that, to see the hysteria that the Irish media has kicked up, presenting the story as a straightforward tale of a woman who died because she was denied an abortion, with this decision being due to a lack of clarity in Irish law.

We just don't have the facts to say that. Just as an example of how little we know about this, and if you're familiar with the facts of the case as reported, ask yourself the following question: on what day did the hospital start Savita on antibiotics?

Tuesday? Well, that's certainly what Holland and Paul Cullen, the Irish Times' health correspondent, reported in Wednesday's Irish Times, in the most-read story in the newspaper's online history. Savita's husband Praveen is specifically identified as the source for this detail, with him placing it in the exact context of Savita shaking, shivering, vomiting, and collapsing; it was in response to this, he said, that "there were big alarms and a doctor took bloods and started her on antibiotics".

This is what prompted the Guardian's Health Correspondent, Denis Campbell, to end his piece on the coming investigations into what happened in Galway by saying:

"Savita appeared to be in trouble as early as Sunday. The apparent failure to recognise that risk then, and to start her on antibiotics until the Tuesday night, will be the most urgent question for those investigating."

Curious, isn't it, that the Guardian's health correspondent, looking at the facts of the case at least as initially presented, thought the most urgent question was not whether a preterm delivery would have saved Savita's life, but why the hospital didn't start Savita on antibiotics until two days after she would appear to have been in danger?

To his mind this seemed less like an abortion story than one about a failure to anticipate possible infection. But of course, he was entirely dependent on the facts as originally reported by the Irish Times, quoting an interview with Praveen that took place several days before the story was published on 14 November.

RTE, strangely enough, seems to suggest that this isn't what happened. The national broadcaster's website  states that it had obtained details of the timeline of events as viewed by Galway University Hospital, with the hospital saying that on Monday 22 October, "After 24 hours of admission, antibiotics are given."

So it would appear that on this, at least, Praveen and the hospital disagree. Except that Praveen was interviewed by Kitty Holland a second time, this second interview being posted on the Irish Times' website for people to listen to. You should definitely do so, at least if you're genuinely interested in what happened in this horrible situation. About four minutes into this interview, Praveen clearly and explicitly states that the hospital put Savita on antibiotics on Sunday. He said that on Sunday Savita was told that it looked like the baby wouldn't survive and that it would be all over in four or five hours; she was put on a drip, he says, and the hospital started her on antibiotics.

Which was it? Tuesday, as Praveen originally said? Sunday, as he now says? Or Monday, as the hospital apparently says?

If you're still inclined to make assertions about this, try this: when did Savita's baby die?

Well, the initial Irish Times report stated that at lunchtime on Wednesday -- more specifically around two o'clock according to the interview which we can listen to --  the foetal heartbeat stopped, and Savita was taken to theatre to have contents of her womb removed.

But RTE reports that, according to the hospital, she was transferred to theatre on Tuesday, with spontaneous miscarriage happening there. Or at least, so I read the terse statement "Patient transferred to theatre. Spontaneous miscarriage occurs." The hospital account seems to suggest that this happened late on Tuesday night, as it says Savita was taken from theatre to the Intensive Care Unit on Wednesday.

Or was she? Because that's not what Praveen says. He says, on the recording, that Savita was taken to the High Dependency Unit and Praveen went there with her. He says he went home at about ten at night to freshen up, and between half eleven and twelve he got a call from the hospital and rushed there as she had been transferred to the Intensive Care Unit.

Not Just Difference of Interpretation; Differences of Fact

We probably shouldn't be surprised that the hospital's version of events, even in this bald form, is substantially different from what the Irish Times has published. Remember James Reilly's admonition not to prejudge things, and his caution that he was privy to facts that he wasn't privileged to share? Look at the problems that even a cursory comparison of the two timelines present us with:

• The Irish Times quotes Praveen as saying that the hospital started Savita on antibiotics on Tuesday and features a recording of a later interview with him saying it did so on Sunday; RTE reports the hospital as saying that she was started on them on Monday.
• The Irish Times reports Praveen as saying that the baby died at lunchtime on Wednesday, but RTE says the hospital has it that spontaneous miscarriage occurred in theatre on Tuesday.
• Praveen says that Savita was taken from theatre to the High Dependency Unit on Wednesday as the hospital said she should spend a few hours there, that he followed her there, and that approaching midnight he got a call which caused him to hurry to hospital as Savita had been taken to the Intensive Care Unit; RTE says that the hospital says Savita was taken from theatre to the ICU on Wednesday, apparently without going to the HDU.
• I'm not even sure if the accounts of what happened on the original Sunday match up. In the recording Praveen describes himself being told by the doctor "It looks as though the baby's not going to survive," confirming that he was sure of this. The original Irish Times report described this by saying that Savita "was found to be miscarrying", which to an utter layman like me sounds absolutely certain. But according to RTE, the hospital say that Savita was taken to the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Unit with "a threatened miscarriage". Now, I'm obviously no expert, but this sounds like something like a situation where the baby* could perhaps be saved.

Still, even without getting into what happened on the original Sunday, it still seems clear that the two accounts are utterly impossible to reconcile. Either Praveen is wrong, or the hospital is wrong, or RTE's source isn't in fact the hospital and is making things up. I have no idea of telling which is which, and right now I think there are very few people who do. 

If RTE's source is indeed the hospital -- if this is indeed the timeline of events as viewed by the hospital -- then we have to think about what this would mean. Even with poor documentation, the hospital should have clear records of what day Savita was taken to theatre, and whether she was taken straight from theatre to the ICU or whether she first spent a few hours in the HDU, and there should be very clear records of when antibiotics were started.

If the hospital's paper trail matches the timeline as given by RTE, then this surely means that either the hospital's story is substantially correct and Praveen's is wrong, for whatever reason, or else that there has been a massive effort made in the hospital to cover up something very dodgy. If it's the latter, we'd be dealing with massive malpractice, and a huge cover-up.

And no, I'm not suggesting that for an instant. But that's what this would mean, if it were the case.

Right now we just don't know, which is why we have to wait for the hospital's own investigation and the HSE's investigation to be complete. Faced with a story as shocking as this, people have serious grounds for worry, and even for anger, but we don't know what we should be worried or angry about.

As Kitty Holland says, in the middle of today's column, it has not yet been established whether Savita's death could have been avoided had her reported request for a termination been granted.

Note to the Irish Fourth Estate: the Spectator sees more of the Game

Certainly, one thing I'm worried about is the quality of journalism in Ireland at the moment.

How has the Irish Times ran two conflicting versions -- one written, one aural -- of the same story, and not noticed that they contradict each other? Did Kitty Holland not spot, the second time she interviewed Praveen, that his story had changed in at least one small but vitally important respect?

How has nobody picked up on the fact that the sequence of events as described by the Irish Times, with Praveen as a source, and RTE, dependent on the hospital's viewpoint, are completely at odds with each other?

Why is the Irish Times coverage of this against the backdrop of how things are so much better in Britain, glossing over how many women die in Britain every year from pregnancy-related sepsis, and with Britain's law spectacularly** misrepresented?

Why hasn't the Irish Times reported on the apparent fact that pro-choice groups in Ireland were given wind of a 'denial of abortion' story several days before the Irish Times ran Kitty Holland's and associated pieces?  Just judging by what I noticed on Twitter on Tuesday night it seemed to me that last Wednesday's vigil, for instance, was as about as spontaneous and organic as such things can be, but it also seems clear that certain people who advocate abortion pretty much on demand -- clarification on 'X' looking like little more a a wedge for them -- were well positioned that day to shape the story of Savita's death as a 'denial of abortion' one, when it may have been nothing of the sort, and to whip up popular rage on this issue. At the very least, surely any responsible paper should be asking whether cynical opportunism is at work...

And why on earth is it that nobody's screaming about how the Irish Times is reporting that the Gardaí say 10-12,000 people took part in today's march through Dublin in remembrance of Savita, demanding that Irish abortion law needs to be changed so nobody else need ever die as she did -- even though, as noted, no link between the two has yet been established -- while RTE is saying that Garda figure is merely that more than 6,000 people marched?

Other parts of the march, to be fair, looked more dense than this.

Though I'd not rule out the larger figure, I find the smaller one a bit more plausible, given that this march took up six or at most seven times as much space on the ground as the 'March for Choice' one in early October that had just 850 people in. Thereabouts, anyway. You remember, the one where Garda estimates, as reported in the Irish Times, were dramatically and mysteriously raised from about 800 to more than 2000. 'Several thousand', as the Irish Times eventually put it. But still, surely the thing to wonder is why the Gardaí are supposedly giving out different figures for this.

This stuff is serious. We need to be honest here, and refrain from manipulating numbers because we don't like how they don't suit us, holding off until the facts are in before jumping on stories that suit our agendas.

It may well be that pro-lifers are going to find that they have blood on their hands over this, but we just don't know. As things stand, it's almost as though Irish journalists have en masse decided to abandon all pretence of objectivity, and have taken sides, like cheerleaders with typewriters, the very thing that former Irish Times sports writer Tom Humphries rightly said journalists should never be.

There are investigations going on. We need to wait.

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* I've noticed no shortage of people out there sneering at pro-lifers describing Savita's daughter as a baby, rather than a foetus. You can see a good example of that quoted over on this midwife's blogpost on the matter. Here's the thing: it's clear that Praveen and Savita called their unborn child a baby. Listen to the long interview with Praveen on the the Irish Times website. He repeatedly refers to his daughter as a baby.

** The other day, for instance, there was a piece entitled 'What would have happened in Britain?', which cited two of Britain's leading abortion providers as sources and wrongly claimed that British doctors "are legally able to carry out abortions until the 24th week of a pregnancy for all reasons, not just medical". This is a commonly-held and utterly false trope in Ireland; abortion is fundamentally illegal in Britain even now, under the terms of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act or the 1929 Infant Life (Preservation) Act.

Rather than legalising abortion, the 1967 Abortion Act conferred certain defences against illegality upon doctors who carry out terminations, provided the terminations cab be justified under at least one of five grounds. Two of these grounds, being injury greater than that caused by termination to the health of the woman or her existing children, are subject to a 24-week gestational limit. British doctors are most definitely not allowed to carry out pregnancies up to that point "for all reasons", which is why there was a huge ruckus earlier this year when it was discovered that British clinics were aborting babies because their parents didn't want to have baby girls.

And the Irish Times know this: it specifically reported on this issue back in February.

Medical Malpractice and Treating Tragedies as Political Footballs

The horrific news last night that a 31-year-old dentist, Savita Halappanavar, died from septicaemia a fortnight ago following a miscarriage in Galway University Hospital looks almost as perplexing as it is tragic. I'm glad that two investigations are currently taking place into what exactly happened, because the whole thing mystifies and appalls me.

Seemingly Savita presented at hospital seventeen weeks pregnant and in extreme pain, and was told she was miscarrying; the following day she asked for the pregnancy to be terminated, but was denied one on the basis that the child was still alive, with somebody saying 'this is a Catholic country'; she remained in pain for two-and-a-half further days until the foetal heartbeat stopped. 

The Irish Times goes on to say that the third day Savita was in hospital she asked if labour could be induced to end the pregnancy, but the consultant refused, again apparently saying it was the law and 'this is a Catholic country'. Savita remained in agony all that night and into a fourth day, but the hospital refused to end this. Eventually the foetal heartbeat stopped, and Savita was taken to ward.

Two days later she died.

Obviously this is horrible, sickening, and tragic. 

I hope those investigations get to the bottom of what happened. I'd hope too, that appropriate action be taken if anyone claimed that the hospital couldn't help Savita as it would be against the law for it to do so, especially on the spurious grounds that, as was supposedly said, 'this is a Catholic country'. And if the hospital's negligence veered into the realms of the criminal, then I really hope there are suitable consequences.

The thing is, assuming that the reporting is accurate, and given the Irish Times' recent record on life issues, it may not be, this doesn't make sense. As far as I can see, Galway University Hospital would have been fully within its legal rights to have induced a preterm delivery -- or foetal evacuation -- in an attempt to save both mother and child. Indeed, not merely would it have been within its rights to do so, doing so would have been normal medical practice. 

This is exactly the sort of thing that Dr Berry Kiely talked about back on what was an uncommonly good Vincent Browne show back in the Spring -- you induce a preterm delivery, thus saving the mother, and you do everything you can to try to save the child. You almost certainly fail, but you try. 

In 2000, Professor John Bonnar, then chairman of Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which represents 90%-95% of Ireland's obstetricians and gynaecologists, explained the situation to the All Party Oireachtas Committee's Fifth Report on Abortion as follows:

'In current obstetrical practice rare complications can arise where therapeutic intervention is required at a stage in pregnancy when there will be little or no prospect for the survival of the baby, due to extreme immaturity. In these exceptional situations failure to intervene may result in the death of both the mother and baby. We consider that there is a fundamental difference between abortion carried out with the intention of taking the life of the baby, for example for social reasons, and the unavoidable death of the baby resulting from essential treatment to protect the life of the mother.'

In other words, for the hospital to have induced labour of the foetus with the intention of saving Savita, would, surely, have been in accord both with Irish law and normal Irish medical practice. It seems that such situations have nothing to do with the X Case, for all the well-meant cries that the failure of the Oireachtas to legislate for that is to blame here.

Bonnar elaborated on such situations as follows:

'We have never regarded these interventions as abortion. It would never cross an obstetrician’s mind that intervening in a case of pre-eclampsia, cancer of the cervix or ectopic pregnancy is abortion. They are not abortion as far as the professional is concerned, these are medical treatments that are essential to protect the life of the mother. So when we interfere in the best interests of protecting a mother, and not allowing her to succumb, and we are faced with a foetus that dies, we don’t regard that as something that we have, as it were, achieved by an abortion.  

Abortion in the professional view to my mind is something entirely different. It is actually intervening, usually in a normal pregnancy, to get rid of the pregnancy, to get rid of the foetus. That is what we would consider the direct procurement of an abortion. In other words, it’s an unwanted baby and, therefore, you intervene to end its life. That has never been a part of the practice of Irish obstetrics and I hope it never will be.'

Despite having no shortage of friends who are medical practitioners of one sort or another, including embryologists, obstetricians, and midwives, I'm obviously not one myself so I'm not qualified to judge, but it seems to me that at least on the basis of the facts as reported, this was a straightforward and stomach-churning case of shocking -- possibly even criminal -- medical malpractice with a tragic outcome.

After all, section 21.4 of Ireland's Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners seems to be unambiguous about this sort of situation, saying exactly what Professor Bonnar said to the Oireachtas Committee:

'In current obstetrical practice, rare complications can arise where therapeutic intervention (including termination of a pregnancy) is required at a stage when, due to extreme immaturity of the baby, there may be little or no hope of the baby surviving. In these exceptional circumstances, it may be necessary to intervene to terminate the pregnancy to protect the life of the mother, while making every effort to preserve the life of the baby.'

This is indeed the standard by which this affair should be judged. The problem here wasn't with the law.

The problem wasn't with religion either, for all that people are leaping to blame Galway's religious ethos, or the stupid and bizarre claims that 'this is a Catholic country'. Leaving aside how Ireland is not legally defined as a Catholic country, Catholic teaching allows for the normal Irish medical practice in this case, just as Irish law does. 

The problem seems to have been solely with somebody -- for whatever reason -- failing to obey both the law and the medical profession's own code of conduct, and attributing their failure to Ireland being -- supposedly -- a Catholic country. If that's what's happened then people should be bloody furious about this.

But while anger's one thing, it makes no sense to talk of how this tragedy means we should change the law to make sure that this doesn't happen again. Law isn't magic: if doctors can disregard law and medical practice now, then they can do so in the future, regardless of what the law says.

At least based on the facts as reported, I don't see how new legislation would help here. There are clearly people who think Ireland's laws, which require that human life be respected and protected from conception to natural death, are barbaric and oppressive. I understand that, but regardless of what they think, it really seems that Ireland's laws weren't at fault here. I may turn out to be wrong, but as far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with the X Case.

There are investigations that need to run their course. There'll be a time for anger, and we should make sure it's the right kind of anger, and directed at the right target. In the meantime, I think it'd be best if Savita Halappanavar weren't treated as a political football.


Update: It's been pointed out to me that according to the reports, Savita was admitted to hospital with a miscarriage underway, her cervix being open from Sunday, but that antibiotics were only brought into play on Tuesday night, a full two days later; it's as though she spent two days there with an open wound. Again, I'm no doctor and would appreciate if someone could clarify this, but given that this was a case of death from infection,  it seems to me to have been utterly egregious medical negligence from the start, and nothing whatsoever to do with the law, medical guidelines, or religious principles. 

Christmas Trees, and Belgian Waffle

Few things exasperate me quite as much as the perennial ‘War on Christmas’ stories. They’re usually ill-founded, they leave otherwise sensible religious people sounding crazy, and their inevitable correction enables clueless sorts to start spouting anti-Christian nonsense of their own that almost invariably goes unchecked.

I'm not going to link to people about this one, because I'm annoyed with folk on both sides of this argument as I think they've all let themselves down, but today, for instance, we had the spectacle of people muttering darkly about Brussels having decided that instead of having its traditional Nativity Scene and Christmas Tree in the Grand Place, it would replace them with an ‘electronic winter tree’. 

Seemingly, the Brussels councilwoman Bianca Debaets believes that this decision was down to religious sensitivities, saying, ‘For a lot of people who are not Christians, the tree there is offensive to them.’ 

Philippe Close, president of Brussels Tourism is suitably dismissive of this attitude, saying, 

‘Let’s be clear. There’ll be a Christmas tree and a Nativity scene. Christmas traditions will be respected. The theme this year is Winter pleasures, at the huge Christmas market that has a worldwide reputation. We wanted to emphasise culture and modernity, so asked artists to reinvent the Christmas tree, which is actually a pagan symbol.’

So it seems the plan is to have the Nativity scene there as usual, although the tree is indeed to be replaced with a 25m installation with a vague tree shape, made from screens and with a viewing platform at the top. About 12,000 people have signed a petition asking that the traditional tree be restored, but I’m not clear on their reasoning; it may have been aesthetic or environmental as much as anything else, given that this ‘tree’ looks incredibly tacky and surely requires a ludicrous amount of power.

Mmmm. Tasteful, traditional, *and* environmentally-friendly. Go Brussels.

So, the main story here is a storm in a teacup. There’ll still be a crib, there’ll be something vaguely reminiscent of a tree, and this has nothing to do with placating the 25pc or so of Brussels’ population who are Muslims, which isn’t really surprising as Muslims tend to be grand with the whole Christmas thing. 

That said, I find myself wanting to kick furniture whenever I see people wittering about Christmas trees being pagan symbols. This, frankly, is historical ignorance and incompetence at its worst. It always amazes me to see people who shout and scream about evidence and scientific ignorance propagating such shameless rot.

It’s the same kind of claptrap as saying ‘People nowadays insult people by sticking up their fingers at them, and the archers at Agincourt did that, so that must be why people do it now.’ 

Leaving aside the fact that the evidence doesn't even suggest that the archers at Agincourt did any such thing, this is utter gibberish because it fails to demonstrate a connection. All it does is note two similar behaviours and proclaims a link between them. There might be correlation at work, but there’s no evidence of causation. 

People like to bang on about the pagan roots of Christmas, but doing so requires a) ignorance and b) a fair amount of unhistorical thinking. 

Yule live to regret this...

Sometimes they’ll say it’s based on Yule, for instance. The ancient Germanic and Norse festival of Yule, I mean, not the modern made-up form of Yule, which like all Neopaganism is really just a reaction to Christian practices and can’t be dated any further back than the nineteenth century.

The problem with this Yule is that it’s based on very flimsy evidence, which also happens to ridiculously Teutonocentric; it's a version of that Edwardian notion of everything worth talking about being German. Still, the big issue is its flimsiness.

Writing in the eight century, Bede says Yule was the name the Angles and Saxons gave December or sometimes December bleeding into January. Seemingly they had a big celebration on the same night as the Christians celebrated Christmas, calling it the mothers’ night, though Bede doesn’t know why. Even assuming that Bede was right about this festival, which he might not have been, given that Anglo-Saxon paganism was in its death throes when he was writing, this isn’t saying a lot.

Pretty much everything else we ‘know’ about Yule is from thirteenth-century Christian writers, who say that their Viking ancestors had celebrated a Yule feast, involving the mass slaughter of animals and the sprinkling of all present with animals' blood. Our sources say the Norse had shifted the date of Yule to coincide with Christian celebrations, but modern scholars seem to think that it could have fallen almost any time after the middle of November. 

So, given that Yule could have happened at any point between mid-November and January, and may have been shifted to synchronise with Christmas, and was described by our sources in a manner that rather differed from typical Christmas celebrations in certain obvious ways, it’s hard to see how people can credibly argue that Christmas was based on Yule in any meaningful sense.

Of course, if you want to get back to your imagined roots, why not go the whole hog? I’m sure nobody would mind if you massacred your family pets and smeared their blood all over yourselves and the walls of your houses to celebrate the days getting longer. Go for it. Knock yourself out.

I get rather Saturnine about this nonsense...

The other standard modern trope on this is that our dating of Christmas was purely a sanctification of a preexisting pagan feast. This idea seems to have been thought up by the German Paul Ernst Jablonski in the early eighteenth century, when he noticed that in the Julian Calendar the Winter solstice took place on 25 December; assuming that this must have been a pagan Roman festival, he cited this as another instance of the Catholic Church embracing paganism. 

The Benedictine Dom Jean Hardouin, while disagreeing with Jablonski’s interpretation, accepted his basic assumption without analysing whether it was correct, and so a modern myth was born.

Now, it is true that the Romans celebrated a winter festival called the Saturnalia, and it is also true that in 274 AD the emperor Aurelian instituted the feast of the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the celebration of the winter solstice under the guise of the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, the solstice falling on 25 December under the Julian calendar. 

It’s therefore understandable that people who can’t be bothered to look up sources might have assumed that the dating of Christmas to 25 December was simply a case of the Christianization of Roman festivals, especially in connection with the notion of Jesus as the Light of the World and the longstanding Christian tradition of having the Day of the Sun as the principal day of worship.

Thing is, though, this is little more than assumption, and there’s at least as much evidence against it as there is for it. 

For example, it seems that St Hippolytus of Rome, writing several decades before Aurelian’s institution of the pagan feast recorded the date of Christ’s birth as 25 December. In his Commentary on Daniel, Hippolytus said that Jesus’ birth took place ‘eight days before the kalends of January’.

(Granted, there's a possibility that this was a later interpolation, but it's hard to see an argument for this having been the case that doesn't depend on the circular argument that 'the date wasn't settled until after this, therefore any evidence for the date before this should be discounted'.)

That’s not to say that Jesus was born on 25 December, but to point out that the tradition of his being born then seems to have existed by 235 AD, when Hippolytus died, whereas the Romans didn't have Winter sun festivals until 274 AD. 

That date could have been roughly established by early Christians counting forward from the claims in Luke 1 that Jesus was conceived six months after John the Baptist, who was himself conceived when his father Zechariah was serving in the Temple at Jerusalem as a member of the priestly division of Abijah. Certainly, this was an argument used by St John Chrysostom, who died in 407 AD, using calculations based on how Rabbinical tradition had frozen the priestly schedule following the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.

Alternatively, it seems more likely that the date was largely derived from the Jewish tradition that prophets had an ‘integral age’, whereby they were thought to have died on the same date as that on which they were conceived or born. Since some early Christians dated the Crucifixion to 25 March – in connection with the Passover – it followed then that Jesus must have been born or conceived on 25 March. They ran with conception, as commemorated to this day with the feast of the Annunciation, and counted forward nine months to Christmas.

Again, I'm not saying that the early Christians got the date of Christmas right. I'm just saying that it seems they dated it based on Jewish tradition, not pagan ones. This shouldn't really surprise us, given just how Jewish the early Christians were.

So, for the third of my tree points here...

Are Christmas trees pagan symbols, or even more dramatically as I’ve seen them described elsewhere, pagan symbols of winter rebirth?

Well, they’re obviously not the latter. If we’re using evergreen trees, then they don’t die in the first place so by definition can’t be reborn. If we’re using deciduous ones, which I really hope we’re not, then they don’t get reborn in the winter, and indeed don’t show any signs of life till the Spring.

To be fair, this probably uses up a few auld watts too...

Were trees sacred to pagans? Well, yes, they often were. So were rocks, hills, rivers, fires, storms, doorways, you name it. Good luck trying to thinking of things that pagans could have thought of as sacred that pagans never thought of sacred. Frankly, it’d be hard to start any kind of modern tradition without some kind of pagan precedent. That doesn’t mean there’s a link.

Trees appear to have had an important role in the general mytho-religious matrix of the ancient and early medieval Germans, English, and Norse. The World Ash Yggdrasil, for instance, seems to have been utterly central to Norse myth,* and the story of Wessex’s own Saint Boniface shows just how important trees could be for the Germans in the period the less clued-in still call ‘The Dark Ages’. 

According to Willibard’s Life of Boniface, there was a sacred oak tree in Germany, in what is now northern Hesse. Boniface cut it down – the Life claims that he started to do so and a wind finished the job – and the locals were so amazed that they converted to Christianity. Boniface used the timber from this sacred oak to build a chapel, dedicated to Saint Peter, which became the nucleus of his second monastic foundation, which he established at Fritzlar. This was in the early eighth century.

Here’s the thing, though. The Christmas tree, as a phenomenon, seems to date back no earlier than the sixteenth century, and certainly no earlier than the fifteenth. 

Insofar as we can ascertain the origins of the Christmas tree, it seems to have been a development of the late Medieval Paradeisbaum. The Paradise tree featured in morality plays connected with the Garden of Eden, but whenever morality plays were put on in Winter it was necessary to decorate evergreen trees with apples and other props in order to make them look like a semi-credible fruit tree, suitable for the paradise that Adam and Eve lost. 

Tradition ascribes the creation of the Christmas tree to Martin Luther, but the story looks like a pious fiction. There is some evidence of trees being decorated after the fashion of Paradise trees in the guildhalls of late fifteenth-century Riga and Talinn, and it seems that during the sixteenth century Germans took to bringing evergreen trees into their homes, not merely decorating them with fruit but also adding pieces of gingerbread, wax ornaments, and strings of nuts. 

I've heard that they caught on as specifically Protestant counterpoints to Catholic cribs, but while that strikes me as very plausible, I've not seen any evidence on this one. I'd expect it to be out there, but I've no books on that topic, and the internet has a habit of coming up short on serious historical stuff. 

Granted, this phenomenon was a German custom, but there seems to have been an 800-year gap between Boniface hacking down the sacred oak and Germans starting to bring trees into their houses. If you really want to argue that Christmas trees were pagan customs, you need to produce evidence. 

Or, I suppose, you can just make things up.

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* I say 'seems', of course, because pretty much everything we know about Norse myth is drawn from Christian accounts of the myths after they’d ceased to be part of a living religion; they are, in effect, Christian fairy tales based on long-lost legends. Oddly enough, Cracked more or less has it right.

Remembering Again

“Such was their burial of Hektor, breaker of horses.”

So, after the description of the funeral games in honour of Troy's greatest son, ends the Iliad, which began by reflecting on the carnage wrought by the wrath of the Greek forces' mightiest hero:

“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which puts pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.”

If the Iliad still speaks to us after almost three thousand years it does so not merely because it is beautiful, and not merely because life is -- among other things -- a battle in which how we conduct ourselves in the short time we have here matters profoundly; rather, it centres on our deep and abiding need to make sense of war.

The first step in doing so, as a rule, lies in commemorating our dead, which is probably why it felt so cathartic last year when Britain's Queen Elizabeth II stood in silence in Ireland’s Garden of Remembrance, recognising all those who died fighting against Britain in the cause of Irish freedom, be that in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916, or the War of Independence. 

Here lie the dead of Marathon, as commemorated by the 192 horsemen of the Parthenon frieze.

As long as we've fought we have commemorated our dead, often giving our warrior dead special honours in death. Stephen Pinker argues that the high proportion of prehistoric skeletons showing evidence of violent trauma shows that we've become less violent over the millennia, but he glosses over how those who've died in battle are often specially honoured in death, such that their graves are more easily found than those of people who've died in more mundane ways. If anything, I suspect we've become far more violent over the centuries. 

It's not less violent to kill someone with guided drones than with a knife; it's just tidier. For us. 

As a war historian, and an Irishman who happens to be half-English and has lived in England for most of the last decade, I've long found Remembrance Sunday deeply problematic. Indeed, the first couple of weeks of November are always tricky for me. All Saints and All Souls are feasts of remembrance to which I unambiguously ally myself, but I dislike Guy Fawkes Night, and I'm always uncomfortable about Remembrance Sunday, though I think it important that Britain's war dead be properly honoured and that her veterans be properly supported; even now far too many of Britain's homeless are people who once served their country in arms.

I've had no shortage of family members who've fought in Britain's wars, whether in the Chitral Expedition, the Boer War, the Great War, World War II, or even Northern Ireland, but it wasn't until 2006 that I first wore a poppy, pinned onto my coat by a then recent ex-girlfriend one windy day in Liverpool as she managed the trick of firmly murmuring "I feel you should wear this". 

The first challenge is how to honour the dead without glorifying the wars in which they fought. We have to be honest and admit that plenty of Britain's wars have been far from honourable. The aforementioned Boer War, for instance, was a shameless land grab, and is hardly unique among Britain's wars in meriting such a description. I think most of us feel uncomfortable about the many wars Britain fought to deny people their independence, wherever they might be. And then, of course, there's the little matter of the invasion of Iraq nine years ago, justified at the time by the transparent fiction that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which he was refusing to surrender. 

The German cemetery at Langemarck. Because thousands of German children marched to war in 1914 too.

We can't deny this. An honest patriot cannot celebrate his countrymen’s heroism unless he also recognises their sins. "My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case," as G.K. Chesterton put it, "It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

Of course, I don’t think we can or should blame soldiers for having fought in bad wars. War is often the continuation of political intercourse with the intermixing of other means, and as Kevin O’Higgins put it when putting down the Irish army mutiny in 1924, “those who take the pay and wear the uniform of the state, be they soldiers or police, must be non-political servants of the state.”

This has a correlative, however; if we’re not to shame soldiers for having had the misfortune to serve in bad wars, neither should we laud them for having been lucky enough to serve in good ones. We need to be careful too when indulging in the rhetoric of the ‘greatest generations’, not least because even the noblest of wars almost invariably encompass a multitude of sins. 

I firmly believe that we should honour our dead, and mourn those lives so brutally lost, and support those who've come home physically maimed or mentally scarred; I also believe that in doing so we should not forget how many wars were driven by cynicism, greed, and pride, and how there has been no shortage of soldiers over the years who've shamed the uniforms they wore. 

Remembrance Sunday, like I said, is complicated.

The second big problem, of course, lies in the fact that as the soldiers of the Great War have died, and those of the Second World War have grown fewer and more frail by the year, that Remembrance Sunday’s purpose seems to have changed, such that it’s in danger of excusing and even glorifying the shoddier wars of yesterday, today, and even tomorrow.

Much of the popularity of Harry Patch, Britain’s last surviving veteran of the First World War, was down to his impatience with those who tended to romanticise wars, and his bitter recognition that war was nothing more than ‘organised murder’. 

For him, Remembrance Sunday was ‘just showbusiness’.

When the reality represented by the likes of Harry Patch no longer exists to remind us of  soldiers hurrying to safety past their screaming, moaning, dying comrades, it’s easy for people to exploit their legends. There’s a simple level at which Remembrance Sunday is about recruiting as much as anything else – I was shocked a couple of years back when the build-up to coverage included an interview with a young Salford teenager  who was saying that he felt it was his duty to serve and that he’d always wanted to be a soldier. 

Of course, it’s always been like this at some level. The 1915 McCrae poem about the poppies of Flanders fields ends with an exhortation to fight on, and to scorn negotiated peace as a betrayal of those who have fallen:

“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

People fought on for three more years, and millions more died in the most horrible and pointless of ways. It’s hardly surprising that Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, damns this final verse as a stupid and even vicious propaganda argument.

Would a negotiated peace in 1916, preventing the Somme, really have betrayed the dead of Gallipoli?

We honour the dead, but we use them too, enlisting them as recruiting officers, summoning our children to serve and die in emulation of them. There’s nothing new in this. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek historian Polybius described how Roman funerals were used in just this way:

“By this constant renewal of the good report of brave men, the name of those who have performed any noble deed is made immortal, and the renown of those who have served their country well becomes a matter of common knowledge and a heritage for posterity. But the most important consequence of the ceremony is that it inspires young men to endure the extremes of suffering for the common good in the hope of winning the glory that waits upon the brave.”

It’s not just Remembrance Sunday that stirs these confused feelings within me. Being a military historian invites all sorts of questions, not least because time and again I’ve had to explain to people that being interested in war doesn’t entail liking it, and I’ve wrestled with these issues while visiting military cemeteries in Ireland and Belgium, Turkey and Greece, and as I’ve walked battlefields as diverse as Marathon, Thermopylae, Trasimene, Cannae, Hastings, Ypres, and Gallipoli.

How do we honour the dead without glorifying the wars? How do we honour them without luring thousands more to early graves? How do we make sense of war at all?

I have no idea. The more I learn, the less I feel I know.