Anti-abortion campaigners can be callous, but Savita Halappanavar is not the kind of woman they find easy to dismiss. She wanted to have children, and part of the anti-abortion pretence is that mothers are the only women who count, and restricting terminations is good for mothers. In contrast to this fiction, NHS Choices explains how treatment of miscarriage may involve inducing early labour or evacuating the womb contents – in other words, performing an abortion – to prevent infections like that which killed Halappanavar.

Not that you'd have any idea of best practice from reading Youth Defence's response. The organisation (which professes to be "protecting mothers and babies by keeping abortion out of Ireland") issued a self-contradictory statement claiming Halappanavar's death wasn't due to Ireland's abortion ban, and anyway, the procedure doctors refused to perform wouldn't have been an abortion, but instead classed with "interventions to deal with the cause of the illness … not considered a therapeutic termination of pregnancy".

Live Action News brought out a grasping reiteration of its favourite refrain, "abortion never saves a woman's life. It just kills a baby." Writer Josh Craddock determined that Halappanavar's death could be blamed on the belated delivery of antibiotics, rather than the lengthy exposure to infection caused by leaving her to miscarry over many days. And you can trust him, he's a doctor. Sorry, not a doctor: a PPE student who had read some newspaper reports on the case.

Craddock also decided that it wasn't Ireland's law at fault, but "pro-choice advocates" for "obfuscating between interventions that risk the life of the unborn child and direct abortion". Perhaps he was getting "pro-choice advocates" confused with the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, which opposes abortion in all circumstances – including, according to its statement, circumstances in which a woman's life is imperilled by continuing the pregnancy. *

"Rather than removing the protection of the womb from unborn children, the ethical response to emergency situations in pregnancy is medical treatment of the mother for the conditions causing the emergency," says SPUC. There's no acknowledgment that the "protection" referred to is for a woman who may die in the process, possibly because SPUC considers the worthlessness of women to be so self-evident it is unworthy of explanation.

Even more compassionate anti-abortion voices reveal their commitment to a brutal hierarchy of life. While there are many principled pro-choice Catholics, the Catholic Herald follows an anti-abortion editorial line. Its commentary on Halappanavar bemoans "a heretical misreading of Catholic moral law" in her reported treatment – termination should have been permitted once "[i]t was clear that [Halappanavar's] death would in any case lead to the death of the child". But note that Halappanavar's life is subordinate to that of the foetus – according to this formulation, her death would apparently be acceptable if the foetus could survive at her expense. Some people have a funny way of being "pro-life".

Then there's Judith Woods in the Telegraph. "What a shameful time to be Irish, Catholic and anti-abortion," she writes affectingly. "As I'm all three, I hang my head in mortification." She goes on to explain why she hopes Halappanavar's case won't lead to liberalisation in Ireland: "Once you have seen four cells under a microscope in an IVF laboratory and by some miracle witnessed them become an embryo, then a foetus, a baby, a little girl, it is utterly impossible not to believe that life begins at the moment sperm and egg fuse."

If Woods understands IVF, presumably she knows that several embryos are created for each attempted pregnancy: treating each one as if it were the moral equivalent of a child would mean implanting them all, and exposing the woman to the dangers of multiple pregnancy – and the embryos to a competitive uterine environment that would mean none of them survive. Even the self-professedly pro-life tend to recognise in practice that women must control their fertility, or be dragged under by the consequences. Savita was a living woman, full of light and love, and in her last duress doctors denied her that control. The poverty of anti-abortion rationalisations tells us exactly how little value such logic really places on women's lives.