I don’t know how this makes sense to you. If the foetus is deserving of a Christian burial, then it also deserves to be treated with the same level of respect as we would expect for any body. Sticking it in a jar and sending it home with the family would be just as big a no-no as doing the same thing with the body of a six month old baby, a six year old child or a sixty year old person.
Here’s the part I don’t get. Another quote from the article:
"They were told to take it home overnight and to return it to the gynaecology department the following day. "
Um, couldn’t the hospital take it to the gynaecology department themselves instead of having the girl’s family do it for them?
It would be considered just as wrong and outrageous if it had happened here in Florida.
My dentist offered me my wisdom teeth last week. Ummmmm, no thanks.
I’m a bad person, because I can’t stop laughing at the no child left behind thing either. 11 week foetuses are pretty small. I buried mine in the garden under a bush. If I had miscarried in the hospital, I’m not sure how upset I would have been to be given the foetus in a specimen bottle. It’s not like it was a recognisable baby that you could take home in a bassinet or car seat.
My stillborn baby had a funeral and was treated with respect for the most part in the hospital.
After reading things here, my thoughts are these people took it upon themselves to “teach the teenager a lesson”.
If being pregnant at 14 didn’t mess with her head, I’m going to guess this shit does.
I had a friend who had a child at 16 and the baby died at 8 months because it was born with many congenial birth defects. It messed with her head horribly.
A few months after he died my friend moved back in to her mothers house and her mother went downstairs to her room to tell her dinner was ready and found her dressing her dolls in Gage’s clothes and talking to him.
I was 20 and un-wed when I had my second child and I looked alot younger than I was. When he was born he had a resperatory infection and had an IV in his leg. One of the nurses took it upon herself to inform me that I needed to be careful when handling him as he was “not a toy”.
The parents should be the people dealing with what they find appropriate for their children, not a jack-ass doctor.
I understand that some children have broken parental units that don’t seem to pay them any attention, but I really think these people were out of line doing that to her.
That girl needs someone to talk to who will help her realise that having a baby because mom just miscarried isn’t a way to ease the loss. Now she has to deal with losing a sibling and a child she may or may not have tried to replace it with.
This is kind of twisted and upsetting, the whole of it.
I’ve had a day to ponder this, and some interesting responses to help me. No Child Left Behind is just plain wrong…Now I must use more of my limited thinking capacity to consider why it’s so damned funny.
Yeah, miscarriages happen and not enough people have a clue as to how frequent they really are–but who needs a bloody lump of spontaneous abortion in a bottle to take home & ponder over tea? I can’t believe a medical professional would so abuse another person in this way.
We don’t really know anything about the kid, but I would be curious about her lifestyle. Not that it would make the “bonsai baby” tratment right, but I could see a self-righteous tough love nurse doing this to a 14 y/o junkie who got knocked up & then lost a kid to a poison womb. That sort of kid would be someone in need of some introspection. But again, we don’t know anything about the patient.
Bollocks. A nurse or whomever did it is not there to make this kid of point and if this was the case they should be fired instantly.
More likely it was just a case of desensitised hospital staff not thinking about the real life person that has to deal with their dead child being handed to them in a bottle.
Horrible horrible horrible
One day I’ll post in coherent English.
Hopefully.
That’s had me scratching my head as well. It would be one thing for some misguided person to give them the fetus to take home, perhaps thinking they’d want to bury it or something, but that’s clearly not the case here. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the person was thinking. Even if was something as innocent as there wasn’t enough room in the lab’s fridge, you think they could have sent something else home with another patient!
I saw the “Baby in the Bottle” today on Sun’s first page. Are you guys sure this is a true story? The Sun had fabricated several stories in the past.
Some one screwed up big time.
Clearing one thing up, an 11-week miscarriage, is NOT a stillbirth. A stillbirth is AFTER 20 weeks.
Hospitals in the UK went through a huge scandal a few years ago when parents discovered that some of their children’s organs had been retained at autopsy. For that reason there are various problems with autopsy and disposal of foetuses, stillbirths and products of conception.
The guidelines brought in to prevent that happening in the future are somewhat vague, but there is no way that it could be just incinerated or given to medical students, without an autopsy and a hell of a lot of paperwork.
But whoever came up with the bright idea of giving it to her in a jar is seriously dim, possibly malicious, and definitely insensitive.
Yeah, death happens, but somehow I don’t think it’s respectful to human life to shove a specimen bottle with a miscarried fetus at a teenage girl who just miscarried and tell her to take it home. I also don’t have the faintest idea how keeping the sight of a miscarried or stillborn child from a mother leads to respect for human life. I’ve read accounts from women who weren’t allowed to see their stillborn child out of some idea that it’d be easier on them, and many of them were haunted by not being able to at least have seen their baby once.