Savita, Halappanavar: Tens of thousands march to demand change in Irish abortion laws

Sativa: murdered by the state

by John Throne

I am Irish. I read of the murder of Savita in Galway with horror. She was murdered by the right wing Catholic hierarchy and their boot licking politicians. If it was not for the tens of thousands of Irish people who are marching in the streets and demanding a change in the laws I would be ashamed to be Irish.

Wendy wrote a very moving, educational and inspiring blog yesterday about shame and how it is used to intimidate and keep people, especially women, down. I cannot thank Wendy enough for writing it; for its content but also because it is obviously a very personal account of what it is like to be a woman and especially a revolutionary woman in this world.

It made me think of an event in my own life that had a profound effect on me and I'd like to share it with our readers.

Wendy talks about shame, the dirty controlling brutal shame.  I am weeping here as I remember a scene with my mother. I went to visit her in her farm house in rural Donegal, Ireland. She was near the end of her life. She was different that night. She looked at me in a different way and spoke to me in a different tone from ever before. When she started to speak to me I realized why. For the first time she told me about my grandmother, her mother, who was hired out to a rich farmer. This was common in this part of Ireland in those days as poor people had children to feed and the land was beautiful but not the most productive.  It was often referred to as the Hiring Fair System, a sort of indentured servitude.

My grandmother, little more than a child, was raped and made pregnant by this rich farmer who was much older than her.  To cover this up, she was then traded off to a man, my grandfather, who was also much older than her.  She was then raped again and again. Of course, these were not called rapes as by then the church, in this case a Protestant church, had approved the transaction.

After telling me this my mother said: "So you see the kind of people we are." She was so ashamed. I said: "Mother, your mother was a great woman. I wish I could have met her. It was those men and institutions in her life run by men, and upper class men, that were to blame for all she went through. You believe in sin, I do not, but in your terms they were the sinners, not your mother. She was a great women. I wish I could have known her."  My mother looked up at me relieved at my answer but the shame was still on her. And it was even the more terrible because she loved her mother with all she had and yet she was told that she should be ashamed of her. I have to say and I am sorry to say it here because I may offend somebody but I detest and hate with all my being  the male dominated religious institutions which control and rule by shame. And killed that poor Savita in Galway and kill millions of other women by their ways. 

I wrote a book about my grandmother. It is called The Donegal Woman. Without an agent or publisher it was number two in the best sellers list at home in Ireland. It would have been number one but we ran out of copies at the height of sales. I had many launches of the book in small towns and villages and some big cities in Ireland, England and the US. In Ireland the launches in the smaller towns and villages were mainly attended, usually around 80% or more, by older women. The book dealt in detail with the sexual oppression and economic oppression of women in rural Ireland in the early 1900's. I was worried that some of the older ladies would find it too graphic. Instead again and again I was thanked for writing it. As one woman said:"That was every women's story back then." My main regret is that I had to write it. That one of my female relatives did not write it. But they were held back by the shame too. 

I remember one launch in a hamlet in Donegal. There were about 20 people there. Only two men and myself. All the rest were women in their fifties and up. The two men were there because we had done some smuggling and poaching together in my youth and they could use this to pretend this was why they were coming to a book reading, and about a woman too. More shame. 

The discussion proceeded and then a small woman with hunched over shoulders, hunched I venture to say by oppression and shame, just jumped into the discussion. "I hate worms you know." Everybody stopped and looked at her. There had been no discussion about worms. I never knew why she said this. She went on. "I was working in a big house. The mistress was good to me. But one night she was out and he just grabbed me and put me down." Then the lady stopped. It was clear she was afraid of what she was saying. More shame. Then she went on but in a different tone: "But nothing happened you know, nothing happened." Then this lady lapsed back into silence. Silenced again by shame.  She never spoke for the rest of the meeting. just sat with her head down.  She later insisted to another lady that nothing had happened but that she had never told what she had told to the meeting to anybody else before.

Thank you again Wendy for your commentary.

John Throne

Women Shame and the Murder of Savita Halappanavar

by Wendy Forest

"For it is not her specific feminine virtue that gives women a place of honour in human society but the use of her useful work accomplished for society , the worth of her personality as a human being ,as creative worker , as citizen , thinker or fighter".

Alexandra Kollontai –March 31,1872-March 9,1952 - Bolshevik, leader of the Russian Revolution.

The act of writing, knowing that the words I say will be read by someone, perhaps by a few, frightens me. The fear of being judged gives rise to the probability of feeling shame, perhaps one of the most uncomfortable feelings anyone can feel. Anyone who has spent time with women talking to them about their individual and collective struggles as women knows that sooner or later the issue of shame will arise.

Shame causes women to keep secrets, to be silent. Many if not most women carry many of our secrets to our graves. Somehow it feels safer to endure our silence(ing) than to take the risk of feeling shame. Many women are not even aware that we have secrets – the feeling of shame is so powerful that it forces us to silence our whispers to ourselves. For some of us, if we run into an occasion to feel safe enough to let go of some words at the risk of feeling naked and raw and exposed in an excruciating way, we take the risk.

What happens next, once the words are out can determine whether or not we will ever take the risk again. It all depends on what happens next. I hardly remember a moment in my life when my body or my words did not feel judged. This is not because I had bad parents- exactly the opposite – or bad school teachers – nothing that specific or identifiable can be pointed at and blamed. It is simply because I was born female. It is like being born black in a white dominant society. It is like being poor or gay. It does not matter – numbers do not change anything. If the values of the society into which we are born are by design values that judge us, construct us , pigeon hole us collectively, exclude us, control us and tell us who what our social roles are – we may be millions strong and without power.

It doesn’t matter if over 50 percent of the population of the world is female, or not white. Numbers do not matter. It is the power to define and classify, the power to own and promulgate ideas, to create, define and construct a norm that will prevail and exclude and force shame onto and into those who do not know their place in this world constructed by those whose ideas dominate. It’s a tricky one- the bad feeling of shame. It oozes into us before we learn to speak. No sooner are the words of the shameful out of our mouths as babes – are we taught to shape and form our ideas in a way that will help us avoid the feeling of shame.

Soon we will internalize these ideas and words – and they become our own words and ideas and we more often than not become self enforcers- collectively our own censors and cops . We learn very early to police ourselves collectively. Very young women learn that we must pre-empt the inevitable and gender specific judgment on our bodies and words and ideas. We learn to avoid shame by shaming ourselves – in order to avoid the criticism and shame from outside our selves. Like women who harm ourselves, mutilate our bodies by cutting , starve ourselves and “offer up” our bodies to be carved by cosmetic surgeons –all in order to pre-empt the shame that rolls over us. Shame is perhaps one of the most powerful weapons there is. It is by its very nature political.

Even as I write this I feel the need to pre-empt criticism – by anticipating responses and explaining why I am writing this. I should not have to explain. I should not have to plead my case before I make my case. Millions of words and ideas that are pure garbage are promulgated in the media every moment – without shame. Thousands of acts are committed everyday against women and gays, against racialized communities, against children and the old and disabled-without shame. So I will resist my own impulses to cover all my bases knowing full well that as soon as I push the button POST to this blog I will once again struggle against the feeling of being judged – the struggle to avoid shame because of the way I have written or what I have written about.

I want to say something about the murder of Savita Halappanavar in Galway Ireland. This was not an ordinary killing. It was a painful tortured death –a woman whose cervix was deliberately left open to an infection that killed her. That is the physical side of the torture. It was a deliberate murder, committed by fellow health care workers condoned and I will venture so far as to say encouraged by the state and by the catholic church in Ireland. The same church and the same collaborating state that protects and hides priests from as far away as the US who sexually assault young children and destroy the lives young and vulnerable innocent children. The children who survive these acts , who do not later in life kill themselves or harm themselves or soothe their pain with drugs and alcohol will without a doubt struggle with shame and feelings of degradation throughout their entire lives because they were assaulted and degraded by priests and adults they were told they could trust. Because their entire being was reduced to simply a physical entity – bodies to be exploited and used and degraded for some perverted and twisted sexual pleasure.

The institution that believes fundamentally that sex is base and can only be redeemed through marriage, that only “spiritual unity” achieved through marriage between heterosexual men and women can sanctify sexual acts. The same corrupt institution that protects these monsters in priests clothing condones the murder of women and enslaves them to their role as nothing more than incubators. The same church and the same state that uses shame as one of their primary weapons to control women and children every moment of every day has once again tortured and murdered a woman.

Who was Savita Halapannavar ? She was a dentist, a partner and life companion , a provider of health care. Her work was socially productive. She was a creative worker. Obviously she had a mind and was intelligent. I do not know her but I will take the liberty to assume that she was a comfort to her family and friends –that she was loved. She was alive. But when the moment came when the state and the church pitted her body against the distressed and dying fetus in her uterus she became nothing more than flesh- her entire being was reduced to nothing more than a complex physical entity. She was violently thrust entirely out of her social context, turned into pure nature. The social context within which she existed, created, thought, cared for others, loved and was loved, was stolen from her and she was turned into an incubator-a complicated mechanical and chemical life support system.

She was murdered. Her body, her mind, her emotions were in these hours before her death were dominated, manipulated, appropriated, controlled and ultimately put to death by a patriarchal state and an institution promoted by the same state. She is one of millions of women historically who have been murdered simply because they are female. Her death is a tragedy-but not an accident. The powerful weapon, shame, used throughout history against women will not be felt by the Catholic church or by the state of Ireland. Yes pressure from below will hopefully make them change the laws that oppress and violate women’s rights to control over their bodies and reproductive capacities. And yes that is what we want as way forward for women. But it goes much deeper and will not end until women understand the power of shame and are determined collectively to refuse to succumb to its paralyzing power.

We cannot afford to base our actions on what happens next.

Savita Halappanavar''s institutionalized murder: Clare Daly ULA member speaks out

Clare Daly and Joan Collins are two socialist members of the Irish parliament who some months ago introduced a bill that would have allowed Savita to have an abortion. The death of Savita Halappanavar is nothing less than institutionalized murder supported by the Catholic Church and the unelected old men that run it. We will add an address you can send letters or emails of support to shortly.

Conference: Austerity, Social Collapse and Feminism

Invitation

Illegitimate Debt, Austerity, Social Collapse and Feminism

What challenges, what alternatives, what actions?

We invite women’s networks, organizations and initiatives in Europe to a feminist Forum. It will be held during the "Firenze 10 + 10" event, between 8 and 11 November at the Fortezza da Basso, Florence. www.firenze1010.eu

Against the worst backlashes on our rights since WWII and against austerity policies, we want to build alliances, to discuss the new challenges and to develop feminist alternatives. To build a broad movement of feminis actions for another Europe : here is our goal!

Imposed under pressure from financial markets, austerity policies follow the same logic throughout Europe : a drastic reduction of public spending which translates into cuts in public services, social protection, wages, pensions, and sometimes in higher taxes that weighs mainly on the poor. These measures complement the neoliberal policies of privatization, labor market flexibilization and precarisation of labor relations.

Women are the first to be affected by these austerity policies for several reasons:

 Following the dismantling of the welfare state, it is women who must, through an increase in their unpaid and invisible work, provide the care neglected by the welfare state. There is already a real transfer of roles and responsibilities from the state to the private sector and to women, making free labor, stress, and violence against women swell, criminalizing their right to employment and forcing them back to their "traditional roles".

 Women make up the majority of the workforce of the welfare state and are directly affected by the austerity policies through staff reductions and pay in the public sector.

 They rely heavily on the services of the social state, which is also crucial  for their participation in the labor market and their economic autonomy.

 Women's health, especially sexual and reproductive health, allows them to exercise control over their own bodies and therefore their lives. The public health sector is very important for the effective promotion of gender equality. But austerity measures reduce funding in this area.

 Less public subsidies are also allocated to the prevention of AIDS, to abortion clinics, to family planning services, to pre-and post-natal care and to preventive healthcare for women.

These policies, in line with the neo-liberal model, are a threat to democracy and to our rights and constitute a backwards move. Back to home confinement, to extreme insecurity and dependence, to violence against women, to the exclusion of millions of women from access to basic needs.

Faced with this situation, women are organizing. In several European countries networks of feminist organizations wishing to voice their demands and alternatives, build solidarity, a European feminist movement of resistance against austerity. Initiatives have already taken place and continue with public debates, international tours of feminists in several European countries, the production of various publications ...

Refuse austerity, make our proposals heard

Not only austerity measures are socially unacceptable, they are also inefficient from an economic point of view. Presented as essential to reduce public deficits and debts, instead they initiate a vicious cycle: recession, rising deficits, austerity, etc…

Alternatives exist to this social collapse. They involve bringing the financial sector to democratic control. They also involve questioning the illegitimate public debt, as different citizen collectives auditing the debt do many countries.

European governments have clearly no intention to refuse the dictates of the financial markets or the austerity they impose ; we can only rely on the power born out of strong mobilization to impose change. But there will be no strong mobilizations without women, who represent more than half the population.

To fight against these austerity policies and implement proposals for the control of the financial sector, to develop a new model of society in Europe, we, women in Europe, must meet, discuss and act! In short, we need to create a process of union of European feminist struggles against illegitimate debt and austerity.

Signatures:

- Magda Alves - Member of the Portuguese feminist UMAR

- Sylviane DAHAN, "Women of Enllaç", Spokeswoman of the Federation of Local Associations in Barcelona

- Christiane Marty, a member of the Gender Commission of Attac and the Copernic Foundation

- Cathy Ménard, Women Solidarity Commission Loiret