I’m pro choice. It was her choice to make. She made a REALLY stupid choice and in my eyes is a cum-guzzling asshat. The government still shouldn’t be allowed to force women to undergo procedures against their will.
Not an MD, but I had a childhood friend who was one of the few female hemophiliacs. She told me the only other girl her family new of was a little girl in Africa, some years younger than her.
I lost touch with her before either of us was old enough for puberty, but my mother told me she’d had to have a hysterectomy not long after she started menstruating. I think they tried transfusions, and it wasn’t enough.
Her family might have been misinformed, but they were under the impression that their daughter’s condition really was as rare as Guinistasia said.
The problem with “binary” thinking is that it does not allow for shades of gray.
Is the birth of a healthy full term baby always the right choice?
Then why not allow left over embryos from invitro fertilization procedures to be used for stem cell research? Stem cells are the cells that form without seeming to have a specific purpose. There is a great possibility that these cells can be used to treat Parkinsons and diabetes and heart disease. They may also eventually be used for screening new medications and preventing birth defects..
Or is it really more moral just to trash them?
Maybe people who try to prevent life-saving stem cell research should be charged with murder.
I knew a girl in high school who was a hemophiliac. She had to get injections of something or another to help her blood to clot.
Seems like her mom had it too but I can’t remember for sure.
Zoe:
I’m with you. I’m all for stem cell research.
If this woman was actually informed as to the specifics of what a c-section entails and if she persisted in her ill-founded objections, it would seem to me that the medical personnel might’ve considered that this woman was not entirely rational and considered a consultation with psychiatry and social services. It sounds like this woman was in a high-risk situation to begin with, because if she had a normal OB she wouldn’t have had to bounce from hospital to hospital like that if she were worried about her babies – and she was initially worried, because she went in because she didn’t feel them move for a while. That she went from worried to supposedly not caring if they died if the only option was a section in such quick fashion says to me that there was something more in play than just selfishness or vanity. I also agree with Apricot in that there is a strong implication that this woman is poor and poorly educated. None of the reports I’ve read give any other impression, the presumed lack of a regular OB would certainly go along with that.
But let’s remember that this woman has two older children, so she knows something about pregnancy and childbirth if only by experience. It could be that she was worried about her marriage, and thought that if she had the huge scar she was imagining, her husband would no longer find her desirable and leave her and their children. If she relies upon her husband for her and her children’s very survival, the idea of being abandoned could be her biggest fear in the world.
It’s also very possible that she was threatened with c-section before, or had strong interventions in her previous births against her will and had allowed nightmare scenarios about a loss of control to build up in her head to the point that she was utterly panicked and couldn’t articulate that fear and panic any more clearly than “it would ruin my life.” Maybe she had a friend who exaggerated the details of her c-section who did lose her husband and find her life thrown in turmoil, and she didn’t want to end up like that friend. Again, a presumption of some irrational thought and being poorly educated/poorly spoken tend to go along with any of those possibilities.
I’m pro-life but I still don’t like the implications that the Utah law and this prosecution have on choice. Even though the supposed motivation behind this new law was to be able to prosecute drug using mothers, which is still reprehensible, I can see many trying to use this to make an end run around Roe v. Wade, and this is just not the way to do that. I also don’t like the impact it has on the rights of women to self-autonomy. This coupled with a recent ruling in Pennsylvania that ordered a woman to have a c-section against her will because of a macrosomal baby (one that she clearly didn’t need because another doctor and hospital saw their way clear for her to give birth vaginally) make it clear that there are legislators, judges and doctors who see a heavily pregnant woman as having ceded her right and ability to make the best decisions for herself when they run counter to third party ideas of what’s best for her unborn child. While I strongly believe that those unborn children have the right to life, I cannot agree to using the weight of law to strap women down in operating rooms in order to guarantee that right any more than I can agree with China’s practice of strapping women down in operating rooms to take the lives of their unborn children away.
In addition to the autonomy issue, I’m concerned this might open a really disturbing state of affairs in which any patient who was noncompliant with a doctor’s order or suggestion in any way – or even presumed to be – and has a bad outcome to her pregnancy is going to be preemptorily turned over to criminal authorities as a way for doctors to avoid malpractice suits. What better protection could there be than seeing a potential complainant against you arrested after her baby dies after you and your colleagues have made a case that she failed to properly engage in ordered bed rest, or that she must have frequently cheated on the diet prescribed to manage her gestational diabetes or some other supposed fault which may not be easily proven but the allegation of which would severely tarnish her ability to successfully sue?
You’ve got a parent who feels differently than you right here, because the argument isn’t simply binary. None of us have nearly enough information about this woman and what she knew (we don’t even know what she was told, let alone how much of it she comprehended or absorbed) to make this kind of damning statement.
It is a pitiful, horrible thing that this baby died. Yes, this woman made the wrong decision. But I cannot condemn her for that decision unless I have some evidence that she made it while completely rational and well-informed of all of the issues involved. Everything I’ve seen suggests the exact opposite.
Searching a wide variety of sites confirms that hemophilia is rare but extant in women, although none of them address it very well. My guesstimate based on the sparse information provided is that there are maybe a couple hundred cases of hemophilia A and maybe a couple dozen of hemophilia B in women currently out there. More commonly, women can be “symptomatic carriers”, meaning they have one bad copy of the gene and are mildly hemophiliac. I can’t find any information on non-X-linked hemophilias offhand.
Sorry to have started this hijack, maybe if anyone is sufficiently interested they can start a GQ thread and get Qadgop involved.
I would like to add that all of us are theorising. None of us know, because the article didn’t say, quite a number of things. Let’s begin with:
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How many weeks pregnant was this woman? Cesareans performed earlier in pregnancy are often done with a ‘classic’ incision (‘stem to stern’) because the lower segment of the uterus is not stretched thin enough to allow for the ‘bikini’ cut. Also depending on where the babies’ placentas lie, the bikini cut may not be possible.
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Were these identical twins, suffering some variety of twin-specific pregnancy complication (twin-to-twin transfusion, monoamniotic twinning) or poly- or oliogohydramnios?
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as pointed out by somebody else, how much premature would these babies have been? Would they have been guaranteed life if they’d been cut out of her? Or were they being offered some chance of life, but as good a chance of being permanently handicapped if they did live? (As the mother of premature twins, one of whom was born with multiple disadvantages like a severe heart defect, and multiple stomach defects - and who is still fed by g-tube, and still has not caught up with her sister - I come into contact with a lot of kids whose parents ask themselves every day, did we make the right decision in keeping the baby alive?
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How do we even know the quote was accurate? Or in context? Or even remotely representative of the situation? <digression>Back in 1990 when I was involved with Operation Rescue, I once attended a ‘rescue’ as the sole picketer, while other people blocked the doors of an abortion clinic. Some locals came by, asked what was going on, and said “Cool!” They went home for their pet Burmese pythons, which they brought back to scare people away from the doors. Also, there was a fire in a nearby block, with all the fire engines and everything. When the newsies got hold of the story, The OR people had brought the snakes to scare women away from the clinic, and the OR people (who were blocking the doors with their bodies) had also called in a bomb threat to the clinic. Those of us who were there said, “Huh?” But hey, it was there in black and white, it MUST have been true.</digression>
[QUOTE]
Maybe she thought it would kill her, and didn’t want to risk dying, and not being able to raise her kids?
[QUOTE]
Possibly. Possibly also (though I doubt this) she knew of the risk to future pregnancies (which include an increased risk of placenta accreta, a risk of spontaneous uterine rupture before or during labor (and if she had been given a ‘classic’ incision, a MUCH higher risk of rupture, not to mention she would never have been allowed to birth vaginally again), an increased risk of unexplained stillbirth…
There really are some people who, because they want to have many children, would far rather risk the death of one, than compromise their future chances of having many.
Or maybe she simply didn’t want to look scarred. I mean, we don’t know that.
I’m curious about the doctors telling her she ought to have been delivered between Christmas and January 9…hm? That’s a 2-week window. Why the window? I can’t make sense of it. I wish there were more details.
Hemophilia A, the one that most people are familiar with, involves a factor VIII deficiency. There are a dozen or so clotting factors in the coagulation process though and one or more of these can be defective causing other clotting disorders of varying severities-from a mildly prolonged clotting time all the way to frank bleeding. Some of these disorders are found in women as well as men.
-a medical technologist who performs coagulation tests (among other things)
OK, let’s get one thing straight. I am not pro-choice because I believe in killing innocent babies. I am pro-choice because I believe the government should not tell me I have to die if I get pregnant. To me, outlawing abortion in all circumstances, including to save the life of a mother, will result in just that, and I do not believe that is the government’s call. If that makes me a murderess, so be it. I also believe that if the government tells me I have to carry a rapist’s child to term, they had better provide free healthcare and income because I doubt my employer’s health insurance will cover enough of the costs, and I can’t afford 3 months unpaid maternity leave. One month would be pushing it.
Now back to the OP. This woman certainly comes across as frightened and ignorant. I’m not happy with the implications of this case, though. She first went to the doctor because her twins had stopped moving. The one who died may already have been dead at that point. What was she told the odds of one or both children surviving were? What if she’d had a c-section the day she went to the hospital and the child was still found to have died?
I am not comfortable with the idea that, if I become pregnant, I give up some of my rights as a human being. This case implies I would lose the right to refuse medical treatment. It’s not unheard of for doctor’s to dismiss the concerns of patients; if nothing else, we’ve had any number of Pit threads about it. I can still remember being shocked when I visited a doctor because I was feeling run down. He asked me if I could be pregnant, and, when I told him it was physically impossible, he suggested lack of sex might be why I was run down! If this woman encountered doctors like this guy (unlikely perhaps, but not impossible), or had had a series of encounters with similar doctors in the past, that might account for her action.
Face it, folks, we also know people who will disregard information from people who know what they’re talking about in favor of what their friends and co-workers tell them. I could easily see a friend of this woman saying, “Oh yeah. The doctor told me I wouldn’t get a scar either if I got a c-section, but then this happened!” as she shows her a large scar. We may enjoy fighting ignorance, but we need to remember not everyone else does; some people appear to enjoy wallowing in it, and, given the amount of time I spend over at Snopes, perhaps I’m one of them.
It seems to me this case is piling stupidity on top of stupidity on top of tragedy. Should stupidity be made illegal? If so, I hope my jail cell has an internet connection!
CJ
C-section or not, these babies don’t (didn’t) have a chance given their mother.
Sad.
The phrase “stem to stern” was one I used in this thread, in order to not sound like a broken record. If you read the article, it quotes a nurse from the 3rd hospital as stating that Rowland had told her that
So the “breast bone to pubic bone” quote might be the nurse’s take on the defendants words. The articles are all to fuzzy on details, but I still don’t like the precedant being set by this prosecution. I too, would like to know more details.
Was she really going to face such a cut? Was she only ignorantly afraid that she’d be cut in such a manner? If so, did people inform her differently? If she was going to face such a drastic surgery, how can the prosecutor rest at night, knowing the risks of such a surgery? Does he know, or even care about the risks of such a surgery? Does he really expect to take away a woman’s right to refuse such a dangerous procedure?
Again, I am deeply troubled by the implications, and attempted legislative changes that a successful prosecution of this matter will bring. (2 cases makes for a better “precedant” arguement after all) I can only hope that Pennsylvania’s actions in the case where the woman was FORCED to have a C-section are ruled unconstitutional. Does anyone have a cite for that case btw? :eek:
I dunno why she was worried about “ruining her looks”–she looks like an out-take from Dawn Of The Dead.
This blog with it’s article and entries is terrifying to me. Still searching to see if I can find any more on that case.
Stuffy, I am a parent.
And to further disabuse any notions about what a person on my side of the issue may have issues with: I had a c-section, myself, willingly, and I had a pretty substantial complication during the procedure. Regardless, I would have another c-section if a doctor told me it was needed, without hesitation.
And yet, despite the fact that I am a parent, despite the fact that I am “rational” about c-sections, I still don’t believe she should be tried for murder. I think she’s an idiot and I think she made a horrible choice. And yet that choice was hers to make. I wonder why she made it; I seriously doubt the DA or the medical personnel really know why.
Coupla items FWIW:
For those who questioned (without supporting evidence) the legality of charging the woman with murder…
from the Chicago Tribune
From here
Some of the other facilities are not releasing details for privacy reasons, but I suspect similar documents were signed there (after similar education efforts). Frankly, I call bullshit on the whole “she was just ignorant about what was going to happen to her twins” line of thinking.
Nor do I even really think this is ultimately just about surgery…
If the woman had been told to take necessary medication…or hell ANY step to save the lives of the twins, there would still be folks claiming it would be her right to not do those things as well…this is really about the “right” of the woman to do or not do any action she desires that might threaten the life of the twins.
FWIW, the dangling participle in my previous post is driving me BATSHIT.
One more article on the Pennsylvania case.
Another!
Looks like she didn’t end up getting the C-section, but a court did ORDER her to!
Holy Shit! This better get stopped FAST, it’s against the Constitution. Patients have the right to REFUSE medical treatment, period, end of story. This case amply proves why the right to refuse a C-section should be UPHELD! The baby lived for Og’s sake, and there was no C-section!
beagledave I disagree with you. MAKING a woman do something to her body that she does not agree with, or want to do, REGARDLESS of her state, is immoral, and unconstitutional. Adult females have the right to choose what medical treatment THEY deem best for themselves, (to the best of their ability, ill informed or not) NOT anyone else. This woman chose to refuse a medical procedure. This was her CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED right, whether or not it was ill informed, whether or not you or I would have done the same, or she actually was refusing out of pure selfishness. SHE HAD A RIGHT TO REFUSE AN OPERATION ON HER BODY, PERIOD!!!
WTF?!! That opens the doors for so much abuse of power it’s not even funny. More money can be made from a surgery than a vaginal delivery after all. And hospital stays to “enforce” bed rest would rake in more cash as well.
On a flip side, what about MAKING a woman have a procedure to “remove” extra fetuses that resulted because of in vitro fertilization? “Not all of the babies will survive, and more will survive if we just kill off the weaker ones, so we are MAKING you do this for the sake of the stronger fetuses.”
There are many ways this could be turned around, many nasty evil side effects it could have. Think carefully before you advocate such a thing, because it could even reach out and affect you, male or not. This has been put forward in more than one way through posts on this thread. Go back, read them, and ponder.
I wasn’t (in this case) arguing for or against the merits of the Utah law. There were folks in this thread who claimed that the DA had no legal grounds to bring the charges he did, the Chicago Tribune article was pointing out why he apparently does have that power. (standard disclaimer, I’m not a lawyer, much less somebody well versed in Utah law).
In response to your argument, I note the conspicuous lack of any mention of the babies…who are also patients in this case, creating the problem we have here.
beagledave Did you read the links I posted on the Pennslyvania case? A hospital WENT TO COURT and got made guardian of an UNBORN child. They then got a court order saying that the “carrier/mother” of the unborn child HAD to have a C-section, and that when the operation was done, the hospital would be the guardian of the infant. (The woman “escaped” and gave vaginal birth to a healty baby.) To me, this is patently wrong, and against the constitution.
I think a woman should continue to have the legal right to refuse a medical procedure like a C-section, simply because when it comes to birth, science can’t give “precise” answers for everyone. It’s not an “exact science”. Sometimes, babies just die in birth, with no indications of trouble. Sometimes babies that the doctors could have sworn would have grave difficulties are born with no problems at all. It’s subjective, and a mother’s right to be the “final judge” on the issue should not be breached. The only possible person who might have a right to naysay her would be the father, but that’s shakey in my mind, because it isn’t his body.
It’s a human, with rights to choose what happens to it’s own body, not an incubator!
hyperbole
What’s next? Cloning a copy of your daughter, so that when the time comes for her to have offspring, the clone can be impregnated, and forced to have a C-section, because it’s only the vessel carrying the baby, and has no rights to choose what happens to it’s own body?
/hyperbole