irishgirl, I am certainly not an expert in the medical circumstances you describe, but why would it be more permissible to alleviate the suffering you describe because the infant was just delivered? Shouldn’t the standard be the same as it would be for similar symptoms in, say, an adult? Why should the doctors get a pass because the kid was just born? Or do I misunderstand you?
My concern, because my legalese isn’t good, is whether this law requires a paediatrician to resuscitate an infant that they do not feel should be resuscitated because, in their view it would not be in the child’s interest to have their life artificially sustained. My feeling is that if you feel resuscitation is futile and inflicts suffering, you should not perform it. Being required legally to resuscitate inappropriately is awful.
As it is, here, I, as a doctor can decide not to resuscitate anyone, of any age, if I judge it is in their best interest for me not to resuscitate them. This is usually either on the basis of futility or that their standard of life is so poor that it is not in their best interests to have their life artificially sustained.
I make that decision all the time. There is, for example, no way I’m doing chest compressions on a nonagenarian with end stage Alzheimer’s.
Many paediatricians won’t resuscitate infants with birthweights less than 500 grammes or with severe congenital abnormalities.
As I say, pehaps I misinterpret the law. If it allows the doctor to say
“look, I know this infant is alive, but I don’t think we should be doing anything heroic here, so I’m not going to be jumping in with chest compressions and a ventilator” well, I’m fine with that.
If, however the law requires resuscitation of an infant even when clearly futile and inappropriate (such as visible massive brain injury or a condition incompatible with life such as anencephaly) well, that’s a serious flaw in the law.
How the hell am I ducking this? The Democratic party has a stated platform that supports women’s right to make their developing babys less alive. All this does is reinforce the idea that it needs to take place inside the womb and not after the fact. And thanks for speaking on his behalf but he specifically said he would have voted for the Federal bill had he been Senator at the time. So your idea that he didn’t want Big Government involved would be in error.
I’m not arguing your position since you’re not running for President. I would argue Obama’s position if I was sure what it was.
We’ll just let that lie there. :rolleyes:
Lie… you just made a Freudian pun about Obama.
That’s not at all true. How can a newborn live without support? It needs food and liquids. It wouldn’t last a week without care from someone else. Under your theory, a person couldn’t be prosecuted for child neglect because he/she shouldn’t have to be a slave to care for another human.
For what it’s worth, I really hate the use of the word “parasite” when describing a fetus. By the strictest definition:
“an organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment” it is NOT true…it’s not of “another species.” Using the term parasite is negatively-charged verbage, and is essentially unnecessary, in addition to being incorrect.
It sure seems fishy when people need a bunch of legalese to justify their actions.
irishgirl, I can’t answer your questions as a lawyer, but only as someone who’s had first hand experience in the system in Illinois. My last pregnancy, (as I’m sure everyone knows by now and is sick of hearing) was at 23 weeks and 6 days when I started bleeding and they diagnosed an infection in the placenta. They offered me the option of either being induced and delivering vaginally or an emergency c-section. We were told the vaginal delivery would undoubtedly kill her, due to her small size and a presenting umbilicus. The c-section would give her an estimated 50% chance to survive. But, and here’s the important part: if we as her parents decided to stop her medical treatment at any time, we could. If she had a severe brain bleed or kidney failure or whatnot, we could order them to take her off of the machines.
She had her own medical team in the OR, and they treated her as they would any other patient. But she was essentially okay - if she had been sick, as you describe, simple lack of parental consent for treatment would have been enough to spare her medical intervention, from what I was told.
Because her chances were so slim, I could have had her aborted that day, or probably even a few weeks later, and that would have been fine under state law. No two doctors were willing to declare her unambiguously “viable”, based on her estimated ultrasound size and gestational age.
I *like *Illinois’s abortion law. I think viability is a good rubric, and I like that Illinois demands two physicians make that call, and that they do it on an individual basis, not charts of averages or weeks of gestation alone. I also think that a fetus born living ought to be saved if healthy, whether or not the mother wants to continue her parental relationship with it. If she does, great. If not, adopt it out. My pro-choice stance is based on reproductive freedom for women, not about killing babies for the fun of it.
If the child is sick, then she can, if she wishes, deny medical treatment for it, and if it’s really that sick, the hospital won’t pursue child services and court orders to contravene parental medical decisions. They’re not into keeping very sick unwanted babies alive - they spend more of their time and energy convincing parents of wanted sick babies that perhaps ceasing medical treatment might be the wiser and kinder choice.
Agreed. Along with being terribly unnatural. How can the propogation of any species, let alone humans, be compared to a parasitic relationship?
It makes you wonder if the religious right isn’t on to the correct thing when it makes some of its more outlandish claims…
Not to get too high on my own personal soap box, but human life seems to be getting cheapened more every year…as humanity is diminished and animal life is given higher priority (anthropomorphization of apes and such which are now being afforded “human rights”), my red flags are going up.
Does being on a soap box diminish your ability to read and understand human history? Compared to, say, a visit from a Mongol horde, abortion is trivial.
Heck, if the Bible is to be taken as an example of having been written in a time when human life wasn’t cheap, how do you reconcile all that “and then they put the town to the sword” stuff?
I wasn’t making an abortion comment, specifically. The historical attacks you reference were horrific for the very reason that human life was not “cheap”…certainly it was regarded as greater than that of animals. Historically speaking, in societies that regarded human life as no greater than animals, often human sacrifice was practiced. Now, as to whether human sacrifice came before or after the veneration of animal life would be hard to say. More specifically, I was making notice that in our supposedly civilized societies of today, human life, intelligence and achievement has been considered paramount, especially since the Renaissance some 300-400 years ago. The equating of humanity to the other creatures on this rock seems to be at odds with tradition.
Ancient Egypt appears to have dabbled in human sacrifice, presumably at or around the same time they were revering cats.
Well, the enlightenment included understanding of evolution, which to some degree equates humanity and animals. Personally, I think you’re using examples of lunatic-fringe rhetoric to make a incorrect generalization. Human life was never revered in the sense that taking it was inconceivable. Whatever wickedness you assume prevails today is nothing compared to the casual brutality of generations past. All the 20th century did was make brutality industrial.
Anyway, the relevance to abortion escapes me. Assume for a moment that Roe v Wade never existed. What relatively utopic United States do you think would have risen instead?
One more time, for clarity…I wasn’t commenting on abortion. I was commenting on the cheap status human life seems to occupy, especially as it relates to what I perceive (again, MY perception) as our elevation in status given to non-homo sapiens species. You won’t get any argument from me that there was brutality and poor regard for human casualties in times past…but human casualties in times of war I consider to be different from a poor regard of humanity on a society-wide basis towards it’s own people.
We’ll have to agree to disagree… or something.