The tragic case of Dhara Kivlehan, who died of organ failure several days after giving birth by Caesarian section, is the latest in a number of cases where Irish hospitals disastrously failed pregnant women, many of them non-nationals.

But there’s something strange about the degree to which the Irish media seem to cover each of these stories. None of the other women who died seem to have received anything like the same amount of coverage as did Savita Halappanavar. I wanted to quantify this.

I also included Tania McCabe, the Irish-born Garda sergeant who died of sepsis after her waters broke prematurely at six months of pregnancy. The HIQA report into Savita’s death identified “disturbing similarties” between the two cases.So I went to the search engines on the websites of the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, and RTE, and ran searches for “Savita Halappanavar”, “Bimbo Onanuga” and “Dhara Kivlehan”.

Finally, I included the case of the foreign-born Dublin woman who died after having an abortion at a Marie Stopes Clinic in the UK – a story that’s been used to bolster the case of both the pro-life and pro-choice sides of the abortion debate.

I searched for the keywords “Marie Stopes” and “Died” on the basis that any article discussing the woman’s death would almost certainly include those words.

As of Wednesday, this is what I got:

Irishtimes.com

Savita Halappanavar (555)

Dhara Kivlehan (24)

Bimbo Onanuga (5)

Marie Stopes Died (5)

Tania McCabe (49)

Independent.ie

Savita Halappanavar (200+) (The Independent’s search engine doesn’t record numbers of results past 200).

Dhara Kivlehan (25)

Bimbo Onanuga (2)

“Marie Stopes Died” (Zero)

Tanya McCabe (57)

RTE.ie

Savita Halappanavar (173)

Dhara Kivlehan (19)

Bimbo Onanuga (1)

Marie Stopes died (Zero)

Tania McCabe (3)

**

Some caveats: RTE’s search engine seems only to search through headlines – they did in fact cover both the Marie Stopes death and the deaths of Ms Onanuga and Ms McCabe with more articles, and the search engine doesn’t count radio or TV reports or discussions.

I’m not totally sure how the Independent’s search engine works, but it too left out a couple of pieces mentioning the Marie Stopes case that I was able to find through Google.

With both RTE and the Independent, though, I’m comparing like with like: it’s just as possible that there were more stories mentioning Savita left out of the trawl.

This is a rough-and-ready, imprecise measure: it take no account the prominence of the stories on each case, and as aforementioned leaves out broadcast journalism entirely. But it’s revealing nonetheless.

There are two questions to be answered. First, why did the death Savita Halappanavar receive so much more coverage than the deaths of the other women (or rather, why did the other women receive so much less coverage than Savita?). The answer is obvious – because Savita’s death became associated rapidly with our abortion laws. Many prominent commentators at the time argued that only a change in Ireland’s laws around termination of pregnancy would have saved her life.

Three reports later, this connection has been proven to be completely spurious. But let’s imagine for a bit that the story did implicate Ireland’s abortion laws.

That only raises a second question: why, exactly, do Ireland’s abortion laws merit vastly more coverage than our standards for maternal healthcare? If what we’re interested in here is saving women’s lives and ensuring women’s safety, then why not cover the cases of other women who died in similar circumstances to Savita’s with the same passion, the same intensity, and the same sheer quantity?

What’s more, it raises a third: why did a story that painted a much more dubious picture of legal abortion (the Marie Stopes Case) also receive so much less coverage?

I don’t know the answer. But I’ve got a pretty good hunch. When the National Union of Journalists are marching for the right to choose, when the Irish Times reporter who tweeted assembly times for said march then wrote the news report on it; when the news of Savita’s death was leaked to pro-choice groups before it was reported in the Irish Times (we don’t know by whom); when you see discrepancies in coverage as large as the ones I’ve shown; it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that stories about women’s health, about the way we treat migrant women, and the way we look after pregnant mothers, just aren’t quite as important as stories which advance the cause of abortion rights.

Look, I may be missing something here. But if anyone has a more plausible explanation, I’d be delighted to hear it.