Honouring a Europe at Peace

When the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize is presented to the European Union in Oslo this Monday it will no doubt be met with as much derision as was the original October announcement that the Union would be this year’s recipient.

Much of this scorn has been directed at the idea that the prize could be awarded to an institution rather than an individual, but this is hardly unprecedented; the Institute of International Law received the prize in 1904, the International Committee of the Red Cross has won it three times, and recent institutional laureates include Médecins Sans Frontières and the United Nations.

Others claim the decision discredits the prize altogether, insisting that the Union has only existed since 1993, and arguing that its main predecessor, the European Economic Community, was primarily a trading organisation, unworthy of being credited as the preeminent source of human rights and peace in Europe since the Second World War.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s press release announcing the decision comprehensively addressed these issues, however, explaining that, “The Union and its forerunners have for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.”

Democracy

Summarising the history of European integration, the committee cited how Germany and France have grown together since 1945, how the introduction of democracy was a precondition for the accession of Spain and Portugal to the EEC in the 1980s, and how the inclusion of countries from the former Eastern Bloc into the Union since the 1990s has buttressed human rights and democracy in those areas.

We too easily nowadays take for granted friendship between France and Germany, but this foundational relationship once seemed so profoundly improbable that in 1961 Margaret Thatcher held it forth as an ideal to which the British should aspire, saying, “France and Germany have attempted to sink their political differences and work for a united Europe. If France can do this so can we.”

Given France and Germany’s acrimonious history ever since Bismarck sought German unification through blood and iron, it was remarkable that they could stand together in the ash and rubble of the Second World War and seek to “make war unthinkable and materially impossible”, as French foreign minister Robert Schuman put it in May 1950.

The Schuman Declaration led to the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, with Italy and the Benelux countries joining France and Germany to pool the resources most necessary for warfare, effectively barring them from waging war against each other. The Treaty of Paris, establishing the ECSC, began by speaking of the need to work for peace worldwide, the importance of a stable Europe for this, and the necessity of building such a Europe through “concrete actions which create a real solidarity”.

These “concrete actions” can seem slow and even trivial – the comedian Eddie Izzard has described the EU as “the cutting edge of politics, in an incredibly boring way” – but they have built and sustained peace within the European Union and its forerunners over more than 60 years.

Nuclear umbrellaThis was long facilitated by NATO’s nuclear umbrella, and both the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights have helped ensure that European institutions operate in line with agreed standards of human rights, but neither of these required ordinary Europeans to work side-by-side, day-in-day-out on projects that bind us together.

It would be a shame if we in Ireland were to adopt the characteristically English error of putting the institutional cart before the aspirational horse by painting the European Union as an economic organisation with delusions of grandeur.

We miss the point of the ‘Common Market’ if we forget that it was an economic means directed towards social and political ends, aimed above all else at establishing and sustaining peace within Europe.

Security

Strange though it may now seem, Margaret Thatcher explained this with remarkable clarity in the lead-up to Britain’s 1975 European referendum, pointing out that “security is a matter not only of defence, but of working together in peacetime on economic issues which concern us and working closely together on trade, work and other social matters which affect all our peoples”.

Peace does not keep itself, and John Hume stressed the importance of Europe’s pragmatic, piecemeal, and indirect way of working for peace in his own 1998 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, observing that the “European Union is the best example in the history of the world of conflict resolution and it is the duty of everyone, particularly those who live in areas of conflict, to study how it was done and to apply its principles to their own conflict resolution”.

Visionaries

Hume went on to describe how the European visionaries, understanding the importance of recognising difference, created institutions which enabled and required people who differed from each other in all sorts of ways to work together in their common interest.

During Britain’s 1975 referendum campaign, Shirley Williams argued that the application of Catholic social teaching would be a major factor in Europe’s everyday political and economic life, and although this sadly hasn’t always been the case, it’s no accident that the European project sought from the first to embody such principles of CST as subsidiarity, solidarity, and the common good.

Several of Hume’s ‘visionaries’ - notably Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gaspari – were devout Catholics who aimed to create a peaceful and prosperous Europe, respectful of diversity and conscious of its Christian roots. Schuman, for instance, declared in 1958 while President of the European Parliamentary Assembly – now the European Parliament – that: “All the European countries are permeated by Christian civilisation. It is the soul of Europe which must be restored to it.”

Danger

The danger now, of course, as that we risk forgetting the point of European integration, and it is apt that the Nobel Committee ended its October press release on a note of admonition, recognising that the Union is currently experiencing economic turmoil which in turn is leading to social unrest.

Like so much else in Europe, the single currency was always intended as an economic means towards the political end of greater European unity. It is, therefore, all the more ironic that current efforts to preserve the Euro are placing such strains on the likes of Ireland, Spain, and most especially Greece that extremist parties are on the rise and the entire project looks more precarious than ever.

The Nobel Committee’s decision should be regarded not as an overdue and now irrelevant accolade, but as a stern warning to the politicians and peoples of Europe to remember why we originally chose to come together, and to remind us of what we stand to lose.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 6 December 2012.

Vigil for Life? I'm going with 7,000

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I should probably be feeling very proud of myself at the moment.

You remember how a couple of months back I strained my eyes to exhaustion by counting the marchers at the ‘March For Choice’, reaching a total of 850 or so marchers, which tied in pretty neatly with my initial estimate, a second estimate based on how much space Roman armies used to take up – because, after all, counting crowds is part of my training – and what people on the march had said about how much space the march took up, and the figures first reported by the Guards and the Irish Times, before they were pressurised into changing their numbers?

Well, somebody’s tried a similar kind of thing with Tuesday’s ‘Vigil for Life’, one Andrew Flood, writing on the Workers Solidarity Movement website, having valiantly taken up the gauntlet to count Tuesday's numbers, and, after dotting away on a 19-second video, having counted 1029 people at the vigil.

Andrew says he’s using the same method as me, but he’s not, and that should be obvious; I used three methods, none of which was without problems but all of which gave results in the same range, and for one of them I relied on information given by pro-choice friends who were on the march.

There is a superficial similarity between Andrew’s method and one of mine, as both of us took screenshots from a video and dotted heads as we counted them, but they’re substantively different. It’s ludicrous for him – or anyone else – to say we used the same system.

I counted based on video footage taken close up in daylight from a single inspection point near the end of the march, this being pretty close to best practice when counting moving crowds, whereas Andrew counted based on low-resolution video footage taken from a distance, at night, with such foreshortening that the rear two thirds of the vigil are basically indistinguishable.

This, you can be sure, is generally not how stationary crowds are counted. Still, I think Andrew deserves some credit for trying. It’s tedious work, and isn’t easy on the auld eyes.

1029? Bumped up generously to 2000? Sounds possible...

“Now obviously,” he says, “this is a broad estimate... it’s certainly not the 10,000 claimed by Youth Defence.  Not the 8,000 claimed by the Pro-Life Campaign and faithfully reported by RTE after some pressure.  It’s not even the 4,000 first reported by RTE.  The initial Garda estimate of 2,000 sounds more reasonable, allowing for a bit of coming and going and a few people being out of shot. Sprinkle on some wishful thinking and the fact that people had been visibly spread out to take up lots of space and you might get a reasonable Garda going for 2,000.”

On first reading this I was quite impressed. After knackering myself counting a crowd close-up in daylight, there was no way I’d have tried to do the same thing with a swooping long-range camera in the dark. Indeed, I’d looked at that same 19-second video before Andrew had done so, and assumed it wouldn’t be possible to count that crowd. It wouldn’t, I thought, even have been possible to estimate.

I’d seen somebody claiming there were only 300 there; I’d also heard that Youth Defence were claiming 10,000, which struck me as daft. 2,000 sounded quite plausible the way these things go. And, in truth, that’d not be a bad number, for the afternoon of a cold weekday, and everyone still at work. Still, I thought, I really wish people wouldn’t bump up their own numbers. 10,000 seemed almost as absurd as Ivana Bacik’s fantasy 5,000 at her March for Choice. Should’t we at least try to be honest?

And yet...

And then, after a few moments, I watched the 19-second video again, with the screen enlarged, freeze-framing as I went. I didn’t keep the stills, as with the one I’d worked from at the start of October. I just paused, and looked, and showed them to a (bored) friend, and very quickly concluded that this couldn’t be done.

Yes, I could see Andrew has taken four screenshots – as compared to the twenty I used for the ‘March for Choice’ – and dotted away, and done so ingeniously, applying red dots to people holding candles and green ones to people without them, but looking at this critically, I just didn’t think this was possible.

It was dark. The camera moves. It’s shot from a distance. There’s serious foreshortening with the crowd. The video’s low resolution.

Buses...

Still, it seemed an honest attempt at this, and I thought credit was due to him for trying. I only started to get uneasy when I heard somebody saying that about 2,000 people had come up to the vigil from around the country on buses they’d hired. Was that credible?

Well, a friend said that Youth Defence and the Pro Life Campaign people had told him that their local chapters had organised buses for 1,400 and 1,200 people respectively. That’d give 2,600 who’d come up in buses from the country, leaving aside people who’d made their own way there and those from Dublin and roundabout. Allowing for some double-counting, 2,000 sounded plausible.

What’s more, other data seemed to support this, as I heard of one person having personally arranged four buses from Galway, and of two buses having come from Monaghan, which has a lower population than all bar four Irish counties. More populous counties, you might think, would send more. Still, modern coaches take 55 people, while minibuses take 15-20, so even if we low-balled our figures, and assumed a coach and a small minibus from each county outside Dublin, that’d give us 2,170 people.

2,170 people excluding those who’d come under their own steam, and people from Dublin itself. Is a figure lower than 3,000 even remotely credible?

Common sense seemed to give serious grounds for doubting Andrew’s numbers anyway, so I decided to think about these figures again.

Crowd-counting 101...

The basic rule for crowd estimation is a straightforward equation based on space and density; it gets more complicated with moving crowds like ‘March for Choice’, but when a crowd’s standing still, as at a peaceful vigil, it’s pretty simple.

“There are two ways of estimating numbers,” says Nigel Stanley, head of TUC campaigns, on the BBC website, “One is drawn from having a rough idea in advance of the capacity of streets in the area where people gathered for the start of the march.”

To work this out you need precise maps with street measurements, multiplying width by length to get the area, which you’ll remember from school. Then you apply a rule of thumb that three people per square metre is comfortable and four is like a rock concert – the rule can vary between cultures, because Americans, for instance, tend to need lots of personal space, but this works well for British and Irish people. It’s important to keep in mind that density tends not to be uniform, and that crowds tend to be more compressed in some places, less compressed in others.

When dealing with marches you have to get stuck in and actually count samples and work out how long it takes people to pass certain inspection points – two or more for preference, but you do what you have to –  but with a stationary crowd you can and generally should just work with area and density.

So the professional crowd counters say, anyway, and a variant of that is my normal practice when dealing with battle accounts; it’s hard to read a field unless you’ve a good idea how many men fit on it.

Figuring out the perimeter...

So, how much space did the Vigil for Life take up? Well, if you’d selectively read the Twitter feed at the time, you could be forgiven for thinking there was hardly anybody there at all. 

“Looks like crowd at #vigil4life tiny fraction of crowd at any of the #savita protests despite national well funded mobilisation by bigots,” said @WSMIreland, adding “tricky to estimated size of #vigil4life as view obscured by expensive giant video screen & fancy PA but maybe a little over 300.”

“Tiny numbers at #vigil4life somewhat magnified by photos not revealing entire centre street is speakers platform,” it continued, proclaiming, “Pictures from scene suggest #vigil4life in hundreds @drivetimerte claims of 1000’s nuts,” and retweeting “They’re pipping cheers through speakers!! I'm at #vigil4life this is nuts. About 4-500 tops”.

Workers Solidarity Movement, then, seemed pretty sure at the time that there were only a few hundred there. Perhaps as few as 300. Certainly not the 1029 Andrew himself would subsequently count, let alone the 2,000 he was eventually to hazard, or the 5,000 Nell McCafferty – no pro-lifer she! – estimated on Facebook after having a gander on the spot.

@WSMIreland posted a few interesting pictures along the way. This one, taken from the Stephen’s Green end of Kildare Street is particularly good, as it shows the front end of the vigil, spilling forward from Molesworth Street across Kildare Street to the front gates of Leinster House.  

The WSMIreland caption to it is a bit baffling, though, decreeing “Pic showing just how small #vigil4life is compared to any for the #savita vigils held on Kildare st outside Dail.”

Well, it would show that if the Vigil had been along Kildare Street, but it wasn’t: it faced the Oireachtas buildings, rather than, say, the National Library and the National Museum, though it seems to have rather sprawled a bit on Kildare Street, if this rather colourful image is accurate. It’s almost as though WSM Ireland wanted to mislead people. Or just didn’t have a handle on what was going on. What’s your money on? Spectacular incompetence or egregious dishonesty? Either way, it doesn’t do a lot for their credibility on this issue.

I like this one too, which shows that the crowd stretched back to the junction of Molesworth Street and South Frederick Street. That’s useful. 

The Google Streetview version helps put things in perspective

A shame about the tweet linking to it saying “Picture showing spread out #vigil4life rally not even half filling Molesworth St. despite massive spending by bigots,” but there you have it.

I’m not quite sure why a determination to protect human life, and an unwillingness to have done unto other human beings what we would not like to have been done unto us – basic Golden Rule stuff, when you get down to it –  constitutes bigotry, but let’s leave that for now.

Well, now we have our crowd dimensions, if it not its density. The crowd on Molesworth Street stretched from wall to wall, taking up the footpaths rather than just the road, and as I’ve said, it went from the junction of South Frederick Street to the gates of Leinster House. Let’s pull it up on Google Maps, shall we?

And if we have the space, let's try for density...

I’m going to disregard the overspill sections on Kildare Street, because I have little idea how far the crowd spilled to left and right, and less idea how dense the crowd would have been where it wasn’t penned in my the edges of Molesworth Street. It’s best, I think, to treat it as a straightforward oblong.

Well, looking at the scale, and measuring it out like we used to do in geography class, it seems that the vigil must have taken up a space about 20 metres wide and 130 metres long, which – leaving aside the odd obstacle such as vans and screens – gives us 2,600 square metres. Now, according to the standard rule of thumb which sees three people comfortably together per square metre, this would give us 7,800 people at the vigil, or it would do if there were no obstacles.

If everybody was jammed together like at a gig, well, then we’d get 10,400, which supports Youth Defence’s claims, but I think we all know it wasn’t that crowded, so let’s stay with 7,800 tops, assuming a consistently comfortable crowd density.

But obviously we need to lower that because the area wasn’t entirely occupied by the crowd; looking at the aforementioned 19-second video, and a rather longer one made by Youth Defence, it looks as though they shared that 130 x 20 metre zone with a big screen, a speaking platform, and two or three vans.

None of these obstacles was all that big: if you look five seconds into the 19-second video, you’ll see that the platform can’t have been much more than 6 metres on any side, despite @WSMIreland’s claim that it took up the “entire centre street”. To be honest, looking at it in the Youth Defence video, I doubt any of its sides were more than 4 metres along, but let’s go mad and say that was 6 metres on each side, and go with, I dunno, 6 metres by four metres for the screen thing towards the back, and 5 metres by 2 metres for each of three vans. All told, that means 80 square metres need to be knocked off our total. 

2,520 square metres with three people per square metre at a consistently comfortable density, gives us 7,560. If the crowd had been packed like in a concert, that rises to 10,080 people, which ties in with Youth Defence’s claims, but judging by all the photos I’ve seen, and video footage too, I’m no more convinced by that now than I was on Tuesday; 10,000 has nice rhetorical value, but I think that figure’s wishful thinking more than anything.  7,560 sounds a lot more plausible to me, though it assumes an evenly packed crowd. 

Generally you should allow a 20pc margin of error on these things, according to the aforementioned Nigel Stanley, which suggests that there could have been anywhere between 6,000 and 9,000 people at the vigil.  Watson and Yip, however, reckon that if you’re confident on crowd density and area, you can apply a 10pc margin of error, which means somewhere between 6,804 and 8,316.

RTE’s eventual “several thousand” starts to sound reasonable when put that way, and the figure of 8,000, claimed by the Pro Life Campaign since Tuesday is certainly very possible. It’s not far off the mark, at any rate, and may in fact have been a conservative estimate.

6,000 sounds like a plausible minimum figure, then, but on balance, I’d go with 7,000, allowing that it might well have been rather more than that.

Foreshortening and density...

So how on earth can Andrew have gone so wrong, assuming he did so, which even the bus figures suggest he must have done?

An obvious starting point is that Andrew expected the numbers there to be low to begin with, as can be seen at how at 16:48 and 17:00 he’d retweeted the WSMIreland saying “Looks like crowd at #vigil4life tiny fraction of crowd at any of the #savita protests despite national well funded mobilisation by bigots” and  “tricky to estimated size of #vigil4life as view obscured by expensive giant video screen & fancy PA but maybe a little over 300 #savita”, before opining that the vigil’s organisers would have got a better turnout if they’d paid random people €50 each to attend.

Less than an hour or so later, in a thread which began with somebody else claiming that only about 300 were there, he said that pictures clearly showed that the crowd didn’t go halfway down Molesworth Street and were very spread out, with there being hundreds there, not thousands. At 19:33 he repeated the claim that Molesworth Street had been less than half full. Of course, even leaving aside the issue of density, it’s irrefutable that the crowd went as far as South Frederick Street, which is more than halfway down Molesworth Street.

Still, regardless of Andrew’s predisposition to number the vigil crowd in the hundreds, the video he worked from is of very poor quality, as I’ve said. It’s really hard to count from that, and when you contrast the video with the Google overhead shot, you start to see a massive problem. Look at the van which is on the border of his third and fourth panel. That van, which is three quarters of the way back in Andrew’s montage, was only a third of the way down the crowd-occupied portion of the street. I’ve marked its location on the overhead shot, locating its position with reference to buildings identifiable beside it. 

The video suffers from a terrible level of foreshortening, such that it’s about as problematic as a source can be, and appears to have led Andrew to say “really there is no way at all that 6,000 peopel were tucked away behind the white van.” 

Tucked away? Two thirds of the vigil’s length was behind that van! But then, Andrew doesn’t seem to have had any concept of that, claiming as he had done twice that evening that the vigil took up less than half of Molesworth Street, rather than about 60pc of it as well as a sizeable area on Kildare Street. 

Andrew’s count has 558 people in the three frames ahead of the van, and 471 in the frame behind it. Or, putting it another way, he has 558 people in the front third of the vigil, and 471 in the central and rear two thirds combined. Now that doesn’t sound very likely, does it?

Of course, it is just about conceivable that this could have happened, and if you work from a single source, as Andrew appears to have done, it can happen that you can get desperately misled into believing such highly improbable things. Single-source journalism, as the Irish Times seem to be discovering nowadays, is a mug’s game. The thing is, though, we don’t need to work from a single source. Here, for instance, is a still showing the back of the crowd, taken from that slightly longer Youth Defence video I mentioned earlier.

It’s a far better resolution than the video Andrew used, and gets in a lot closer, and shows us that the crowd was pretty dense at the back where Molesworth Street reaches South Frederick Street. Not crushed together like at the front rows at Slane, mind, but tightly packed for all that. Not surprising, really, given how cold it must have been.

Ah, but was it all like that? Perhaps it was dense at the very back, and maybe at the front, but nowhere else? Well, you know that van that Andrew used as a marker, the one that’s a third of the way back? Well, here’s a shot of the area around that.

We’re dealing with a pretty tight crowd, all told, pushed up right to the sides of the van. In fact, there seem to be about thirty people next to the van occupying as much space as the van. Again, it’s hard to count, given the darkness, but if we enlarge and squint and drop van-sized counting frames into position, it seems to back up the overall impression that this crowd is pretty compact, with roughly three people to every square metre. So far I’m not seeing anything to suggest that this was a sparse crowd.

It has to be said that Andrew, in his count, shows a screenshot where there’s what looks like a patch of spare ground. He presents this as evidence that the crowd was scattered. You can see it, about five seconds in. Watch the video. I could be very wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is the enormous “speakers’ platform” we keep hearing so much about. Yes, I know, not that enormous then; indeed, if you look at it on Andrew’s stitched together four-frame shot, you’ll see that it’s not that much wider than the speaker on it is tall!

In any case, it seems to be the only decent-sized gap in the crowd, and certainly shouldn’t be misrepresented as evidence that people at the vigil were standing metres apart.

Better to light a candle than curse the darkness...

Anyway, these last couple of screenshots from the video with higher resolution don’t merely give us an indication that the crowd density was high throughout. They also reveal that there were far more people at the vigil without candles than there were with candles. Seriously, try counting them. Take other screenshots from the Youth Defence video if you like, and if you can find good enough shots. You’ll find the same pattern across the vigil.

This is especially interesting, because Andrew’s count suggests that there were slightly more than twice as many people with candles as without. His figures give us 323 people without candles, as opposed to 706 with them. But it’s very clear from the better quality video footage that this ratio could hardly be more wrong.

Indeed, on the evening of the vigil, it seemed that @WSMIreland really didn’t grasp just how many people lacked candles, as can be seen in the caption to this picture saying “pic showing how #vigil4life organises have spread out crowd to make numbers appear greater at ground level”.

Leaving aside how poor quality this shot is, those dark patches clearly aren’t empty spaces. They’re people without candles, or people whose candles are blocked from the camera by their bodies.

That Andrew’s figures are hopelessly wrong can be seen by looking at that shot of the very end of the vigil. Andrew says he counted 167 people behind the screen, though having enlarged his pictures I can’t even see half that many dots. Do you reckon you can do better? On the clearer picture, I mean, not in Andrew’s foreshortened thing. Me, I gave up after 300, thinking that life is too short for this sort of thing.

That said, given that life is too short anyway, I’m glad more than 6,000 people took to Dublin’s dark streets on a cold weekday evening to say that we shouldn’t be cutting it short for others.

I'm going to let Andrew wrap it up, given he inspired this post. Very sensibly, he includes an all-important caveat in his post:

“A final word.  I actually don’t think the numbers mobilised have any importance as to whether women should have access to abortion in this country.  My position is simple, if one women wants an abortion she should be able to access it regardless of how large or small a majority of people agree with her choice. That is what the pro-choice position means - the choice is for each women and not anyone else to make.  However the political reality is that the arguments about numbers are going to be used to scare cowardly politicians so I’m not inclined to allow the crazy no abortion whatsoever forces that represent no more than 15% of the population these days away with anything.”

I half-agree with him. I don’t agree with his conclusions, or with his belief that only 15pc of the population are opposed to abortion, but I do agree with this: this isn’t a matter of numbers. Either we believe human life matters, and that without a right to life we can’t have any other rights, and that we shouldn’t deny others the opportunities we’ve had ourselves, or we don’t. Ultimately it comes down to that.

Like the girls said.

Holding Anglicanism Together

Some years ago in Brighton I sheltered from a storm in the porch of an enormous Anglican church, locally reputed to have been built to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark. As I marvelled at how the church interior looked indistinguishable from a Catholic church, a lady whispered that girls wouldn’t normally act as servers there.

“We’re an A, B, and C church,” she said, adding, “It means we don’t have women priests, and we stick to the old traditions.” I asked what A, B, and C stood for, and she explained, “Well, it just means that we stick to the old traditions, really. If it’s not broken, why fix it?”

The following day, Anglican friends at a Cambridge theological college explained that ‘A, B, and C’ were resolutions passed by the Church of England’s General Synod in the aftermath of the 1992 decision that women could be ordained to Anglican ministry. The resolutions allowed parochial councils to refuse to have women serve as priests in their parishes and even to request that their pastoral and sacramental care be reserved for a bishop who had never ordained women; parishes whose diocesan bishops had ordained women could seek special ‘flying bishops’ to care for them.

Women clergy

The Church of England’s struggles over women clergy are in a defining phase at the moment, so it seemed apt that the first thing Justin Welby, bishop of Durham, should have posted on Twitter after the Prime Minister’s office announced his selection as the next Archbishop of Canterbury was, “Just heard of protest call to Lambeth at appointment of a woman as ABC. Am spelt Justin, not Justine. No agenda, just a matter of fact.”

That alone signalled that the Eton- and Cambridge-educated erstwhile oil executive would be an archbishop for a soundbite age, possessed of a lightness of touch and a gift for brevity that has often seemed to elude Rowan Williams, whose ruminative and nuanced style has struck many as more suited to academic debate than to ecclesial leadership.

Divisions

Rowan’s time in office has been marked by divisions over women bishops and gay clergy, such that some have characterised the last decade as a disaster for the Church of England. This seems unfair; Rowan is clearly a brave, intelligent, and genuinely holy man who has made a point of speaking up for Britain’s most vulnerable and engaging seriously with public opponents of Christianity whilst trying to hold together a fractious and disparate Anglican Communion, despite not having any real executive power.

Justin Welby may have more luck, not least because his background makes it difficult to pigeonhole him as a partisan of any particular Anglican faction. An Evangelical by background, Welby worshipped and was a lay leader during the 1980s at Holy Trinity Brompton, mothership of the Alpha Course and totemic headquarters for the most dynamic and youthful movement within the Church of England. His spirituality has broadened since then, however, and nowadays his spiritual director is a Benedictine monk, which should give comfort to those Anglicans of an Anglo-Catholic persuasion.

Welby’s Catholic connections shouldn’t give false hope to those who look forward to a restoration of unity between the Church of England and the Catholic Church any time soon, however. For the last 20 years, ever since Welby was ordained a deacon, the issue of women priests has been an insuperable obstacle to unity, not merely between Canterbury and Rome, but between the Church of England and the various Orthodox Churches.

Vote

The debate within the Church of England about women clergy has moved on from whether women can be ordained priests to whether they can be ordained bishops, and though the debate has been acrimonious for some time, Welby has been firm in his support for women bishops. The General Synod, the Church of England’s parliament, votes this week on whether women should be allowed become bishops, and Welby has unambiguously stated that “I will be voting in favour, and join my voice to many others in urging the synod to go forward with this change.”

Although the measure is widely supported within the Church of England, there is no guarantee that this measure shall pass; resolute opponents of the change are not numerous enough to block the proposals in any of three ‘houses’ – bishops, clergy, or laity – of the synod, but it is quite possible that those who believe the bishops’ proposal utterly unacceptable may be have their numbers bolstered by those who believe it hopelessly inadequate.

Traditionalist

In July the synod rejected legislation which would have given traditionalist parishes significant exemptions from serving under a woman bishop, similar to the current ‘A,B, and C’ arrangement regarding women priests, notably an allowance for traditionalist parishes to request a male bishop who shared their beliefs about the ordination of women. The proposal would give women bishops more control in selecting ‘flying bishops’ for parishes in their dioceses, and would limit the obligations they would be obliged to respect.

For traditionalists, this goes too far, imposing a vision of the Church upon them which they feel is theologically unsustainable; for liberals, it doesn’t go nearly far enough, enshrining discrimination in the law of the Church. Despite their disagreements, it is all too easy to imagine these groups combining to form the necessary ‘blocking third’ to prevent synod from legislating for this. Should this happen it could be as many as seven years before the issue is voted on again.

Whatever happens, the pragmatic Welby seems prepared for such deep divisions to persist in the Church of England, the Anglican Communion as a whole, and even the general Christian world, saying recently that he did not want Christians to agree with one another, “but to love one another and to demonstrate to the world around us a better way of disagreeing”.

Constructive 

Certainly, Welby seems a man well used to disagreeing in constructive and loving ways. After becoming a canon at Coventry Cathedral in 2002, he became co-director of the International Centre for Reconciliation, helping mediate and build peace in war-torn regions around the world, notably in Africa where he once narrowly avoided being kidnapped. 

Negotiation and conflict resolution skills honed in such dramatic environments could prove invaluable in his new job, and his experience in Africa will give him credibility as he tries to hold the Anglican Communion together.

Henry Kissinger is often said to have asked: “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” It might just be that in Justin Welby, the Pope will know exactly who to call if he wants to call the Anglican Communion.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 22 November 2012.

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.