DUBLIN, July 22, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As the Irish government is on the edge of legalising abortion, news has broken in the Irish Press that the London Metropolitan Police are investigating the death of the 32-year-old Irish resident, who reportedly bled to death in a taxi from post-surgical complications after being discharged from a Marie Stopes abortion facility in London last year.
The unnamed woman, a foreign national living in Ireland, was reportedly brought to Wrexham Park hospital in Slough in January of last year, but was pronounced dead on arrival of cardiac arrest due to blood loss.
Ireland’s Life Institute said the incident highlights the threat to women of the “safe,” legal abortion industry, “which kills children and exploits women for profit”.
“This woman died following a so-called ‘safe legal’ abortion carried out in a licensed abortion clinic run by Marie Stopes International, which also provides referral services in Ireland,” the Life Institute’s Niamh Ui Bhriain said.
“The Irish media must now call abortion providers to account rather than allowing them to distract from this woman’s death by pretending that abortion clinics in Ireland are the solution.”
However, British and Irish media are spinning the incident to add pressure to pass the government’s abortion bill, with the Irish Times noting that the woman had “sought an abortion at a maternity hospital in Dublin but had been told that it was not legally possible to provide one in this jurisdiction”.
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Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Frances Fitzgerald who has been pushing the Irish abortion bill forward, expressed her “shock” at the news, and said that the incident “raised issues being dealt with in the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill”.
“I was extremely shocked,” she said. “The fact that the woman had left the clinic and started bleeding in a taxi, clearly it’s very important that we hear the outcome of that investigation and understand what were the factors that led to this traumatic and dreadful outcome.”
The Journal.ie quoted the Abortion Rights Campaign who said that the woman should have been given “appropriate” medical treatment in Ireland and should not have been forced to travel to the UK.
“Forcing women to travel abroad for abortions makes finding aftercare extremely difficult and this tragedy stands testament to what can and may continue to happen if we as a nation leave women who are most in need of care left in situations as we hear of today.”
The Times quoted the woman’s husband, who has asked to remain anonymous, saying he was “frustrated” that abortion was not available in Dublin. “We were worried about what would happen when she became pregnant again,” he said. “She was sick, but we were told that nothing could be done in Ireland.”
The Times added that her husband had said she suffered from uterine fibroids, a condition that would increase the risk of miscarriage, “although it was not believed to be in any way life-threatening.”
Ui Bhriain said it is clear that the story, which appeared in the last 24 hours but is over a year old, is being used as a springboard by abortion campaigners to push the government’s bill. “But the immediate focus for the Irish media should be on why this woman has died”.
“Simply put, abortion is dangerous for women, as well as lethal for children,” Ui Bhriain told LifeSiteNews.com. She added that a previous incident where an Irish woman had almost lost her life in an abortion clinic in Britain had gone almost unreported in the Irish media.
“This is a Marie Stopes facility in Britain,” Ui Bhriain said. “Well, an Irish woman almost died in a Marie Stopes in London in 2006 and the only reason we heard anything about it was that the doctor was struck off.”
The 2006 case emerged as part of a Fitness to Practice Inquiry by the UK General Medical Council into the conduct of a gynaecologist Dr. Phanuel Dartey. Dartey was ultimately struck off for his treatment of five patients — including that of the botched abortion — at the Marie Stopes International facility in Ealing.
“So are they going to ignore the realities of this one too? It seems so.”
Ui Bhriain accused the abortion lobby, particularly the Irish Family Planning Association, of “twisting everything they can to get the passage of this abortion bill secured”. But the bottom line, she said, is that if the woman had got an abortion on demand as the abortion campaigners are calling for, “her death would have taken place here instead of Britain.”
“What is rarely talked about in the political rhetoric is that the abortion industry is full of sleazy practitioners who can’t get work anywhere else, who don’t give a damn about women.”
She added that there is no such thing as a “safe” abortion: “It’s a sleazy industry that attracts the dregs of the medical profession. Women are not safe getting abortions from anyone.”
The Times said that maternal deaths are “relatively rare” in the UK, with about 11 per 100,000. But the paper did not mention a recent report by the UN that showed the British maternal mortality rate, where abortion is available effectively on demand, is considerably higher than in Ireland where abortion remains illegal.