Every. Single. Time. I think I’ve seen the worst of humanity, along comes some fucked up waste of good oxygen to prove me wrong. This heartless bitch refused to have a C-Section that would have prevented the death of one of her twins.
What a fucking vain, sick ass, bitch
Not a likely candidate for Mother Of The Year.
It’s a little hard to see how a murder rap will stick, though.
I can’t say that I agree with her decision, but I also can’t say that I see any evidence of criminal intent to kill the baby in question. Without intent, I don’t see how they can convict her of murder. Manslaughter, maybe.
What are these people thinking?
And on yet another hand, the other day I flipped into a show on women scheduling their non-medically warranted C-sections because they had such busy lives and had no time to wait for nature to take it’s unpredictable course. You know -
THURSDAY, MARCH 11
8:00 am - have shower
8:30 am - go to hospital
9:30 am - give birth
1:00 pm - meeting with planning department
maybe more information on why it would “ruin her life” is important. if she is a model… or… less noble: a striper. a scar could be harmful to her life, if she has no other skills it could make her unemployable, and if she is a single mother that could be very very harmful to raiseing a child. combine that with a strong preferance some people have to natural childbirth and in some ways takeing the riskyer path is not so insaine, especially if vaginal delivery only marginally was more risky.
I dunno if maybe this is something of a hijack, but I knew a girl (yes, girl, I say, she was 25 but had a permanent 17-yo aura) who was in labor for a week. She considered a c-section to be “the end of the world.” Eventually they made her do it, and she was devastated. I never understood this attitude, but she really didn’t seem to connect the “end of the world” c-section with the “live baby=good” result. I tried to point out that having the baby die in utero might be a worse result than the awful c-section, but she didn’t really seem to get what I meant.
[I had a c-section when my enormous baby wouldn’t be born. I would have been one of those women who labor for 3 days or so and then die of exhaustion. I am rather appreciative of modern medicine.]
Some people, I suspect, wind up so indoctrinated into the natural childbirth=good, drugs-or-heaven-forbid-c-section=bad mindset that they really don’t consider the possible consequences of a really disastrous birth. This is too bad for many and sometimes outright tragic; while I’m all for natural childbirth when possible–it’s what I hoped for–there is a reason that women and babies now routinely survive childbirth. And there is no purpose served in making moms feel inferior for their birth experience.
From the article linked in the OP:
Bolding mine. Seems to me like the woman was ignorant on what exactly a C-section entails these days, and frightened. Bet she had horror stories from her grandmother or mother, because it seems to me that I’ve been told that was the way they used to be done. Doesn’t excuse her behaivior. She should have at least asked “What will this procedure require?” and gone from there.
I’ve had a hysterectomy, which uses the same cut. (Almost hip to hip these days.)It’s no fun, but not as extreme as this ignorant wretch thought. I wonder if they will succeed in prosecuting her? I think she should have been more concerned about her babies’ health. Ignorance isn’t really a good defense for murder.
Seems to me the right to refuse surgery is pretty basic.
Bryan Ekers Yeah, that is a troubling implication in all of this. What’s next, FORCING mothers to have surgery “to save their unborn babies” because the doctors deem it “necessary”? What if it’s not really? What if the surgery causes more problems? Also, what if it is “against the mother’s religion” to have such surgery?
Still, in this single, individual instance, surgery did indeed become necessary, and this woman in her ignorance refused it. 
I think it was a heartless decision. But it was her decision to make. I don’t believe you should be able to force people to have medical procedures they don’t want.
The only thing I hope is that the surviving twin somehow finds out what happened.
That’s all. I hope it’s not too much to ask.
I don’t agree with her decision but I don’t think that she should be charged with murder or even manslaughter for making a decision about medical care of her own body. I’m also worried about the implications of precedents for prosecuting people for the murder of unborn children on abortion rights. I’m pretty horrified all round, by both her decision and the law enforcement response to it.
Did anyone else think this was going to be about a vasectomy? :eek:
I don’t understand this at all. Can someone explain how she can be charged with anything at all for declining a procedure without which her unborn baby might die, given that she has the right to choose a procedure that will certainly kill it?
The word I used in my first post was too harsh. What that woman did wasn’t exactly murder. It was irresponsible, ignorant, and showed unconcern for her baby’s health, as well as a frightened unwillingness to investigate matters. Is there a legal precedent that has been set already, that MAKES mothers have to get a C-section if their unborn babies are in distress?
The “pure” pro choice read on this would be that the “reason” doesn’t matter though, correct?
You know, I might make the same choice. I would have the medical information to back it up, and I can hire 10 doctors and 10 lawyers, so no one would charge me with anything.
She’s poor and poorly spoken (uneducated?), so she is being charged with murder.
Another thought:
Theoretically, I can see many GOOD reasons to resist. For instance, the article doesn’t say how premature the twins would have been. I would not have surgery for a 10% chance to save a twin when it would make them be born at 25 weeks. The remaining twin then has great chance of brain damage and disability, and if the first one survives, I’ve got TWO damaged kids to take care of. Always a possibility in any pregancy, but I’ve got a right to make decisions based on my best interest.
One more thought:
I just see her as scared and hurt in the article, not malicious.
Well, Jesus, the story disturbs me too but what we have here are statements from people who don’t even know her (the nurses and doctors on staff at the hospitals). Who knows what her real issues were? She sounds woefully ignorant (as someone else pointed out, she didn’t even know what a typical c-section scar is) and she might also have been terrified of surgery and unwilling to confess that (for example, maybe she misunderstoodwhat sort of anesthetic they use–many people are terrified of dying while knocked out). She might be mentally ill or just stupid, I don’t know. Do you? We’re operating on partial information.
I think it’s awful that she wasn’t better informed but she wouldn’t be the first person who neglected to inform themselves about childbirth. I know a woman with TWO kids on my moms list who asked a moronic question about a cervix this week–a question anyone who had listened to one lecture about childbirth would have known. Ugh.
Our lack of full knowledge about her reasons aside, no matter what this mom did, I am uncomfortable with her being charged with murder.
IANAMP (medical person), but where is it SOP to explain procedures so that people know, for sure, what they’re doing? Or, rather, where isn’t it? Not everyone is educated on what a caesarian is, for example (obviously this was the case here). If she’d known that the scar wasn’t going to be three feet long (or however long she’d heard), perhaps she wouldn’t have been so thoroughly deterred. Or then again, maybe she was opposed to any scarring at all, in which case you have to wonder why she carried twins to term in the first place.