This article alleges that Rowland may be involved in adoption cons, and it tells of her arrest and conviction for abusing her two-year-old daughter at a grocery store in Pennsylvania in 2000. Twenty shoppers and store workers formed a human chain around her car to prevent her leaving the scene before police arrived. I have a vague recollection of hearing that story when it happened.
Not a nice woman, but I don’t like the idea of using her nasty little case to set precedent.
Further updates on poor Ms Rowland… It appears that she wastrying to sell one of the babies to raise bail money.
Poor Ms Rowland being treated like an incubator and all…she truly is the victim in all of this. :rolleyes:
Whether Ms. Rowland is reprehensible or not, I don’t like the idea of a DA getting away with erroding one gender’s bodily autonomy, because rest assured, once that “door” is opened, everyone will lose rights, it may take time for it to really show itself, but it will happen. This trend needs to be halted, and the Pennsylvania ruling overturned.
“Well, Sir, you had sex, and produced a child. Now you must be responsible for this child of yours who needs an organ, and you are a perfect match. It matters little whether or not you have a fear of surgery, or even if that fear is well founded, and you might indeed die. What matters is the life of the child you produced, so you MUST donate the organ it needs.”
Also, for those of you who laugh and say “They won’t do that to fathers, because we are male” or some such. That is the point I am trying to make. If it “isn’t right” or “won’t happen” to one gender, why should it be foisted onto the other, regardless of what point the offspring is in on it’s life cycle. (In utero, or out) Also, I think it WILL happen to some degree, maybe not as frequently as “forced C-sections” but gender equality IS being practiced lots more in the courts so…
Thank god this woman is being prosecuted. If people were allowed to just go and refuse surgery willy-nilly, we might run out of babies! :rolleyes:
And her attempts to con her way out of jail have what to do with the rightness or wrongness of her being prosecuted for not undergoing potentially fatal surgery? Just because somebody’s a lying sack of shit, that doesn’t mean they’re not being victimized and treated like non-sentient incubator.
I still wonder - anybody here live in Utah, and can research the hospital policies on VBACs in that state/area of that state? - what the policy was there?
See, in a lot of regions now, if you’ve ever had a cesarean for ANY reason, you are literally doomed to every single pregnancy ending that way. Not because it’s safer (it isn’t), but because of our litiginous society. Doctors get sued more often for not doing cesareans soon enough, than they get sued for doing unnecessary cesareans. Hospitals are forbidding women to attempt VBAC. Women, therefore - some of them - are taking their chances and staying home to give birth. In some places, they’re staying home without attendants, because midwife-attended homebirth is illegal.
Can you say “back-alley birth”? Hey, when birth becomes illegal…
The numbers are frightening. 1 in 4 healthy pregnant women who walk into a hospital to give birth will be wheeled out as surgical patients. Some of them will have required surgery. Some of them won’t. The number of childbearing women in the US who have had their babies cut out of them must be higher than 25%…and the number of those who will be “allowed” to attempt vaginal birth is dwindling.
It sucks. It really sucks. It especially sucks to be one of those women, and be literally terrified when you discover you’re pregnant, because you know you’re going to be treated like a lawsuit waiting to happen throughout your pregnancy. Dreading the end of pregnancy because you know you’re going to be wheeled in under those lights, talked over like you don’t exist, too much pain to hold your own baby for an hour or more afterward, unable to care for your baby without help for days or even weeks afterward. And what if you already have several kids? How long before you can take care of them plus a newborn, after major surgery?
I don’t know what the fuck the woman in Utah was thinking - she knew her babies were in distress. But I do know how bad cesareans suck.
This is bad, bad law. It’s bad, bad precedent. It’s going to force women to take their chances outside of hospitals. And when bad things happen - and they will, because while birth is as safe as life gets, there are no promises - the doctors will still blame the women because they didn’t just grit their teeth and submit to “policy”.
See, we got this unbalanced woman. A convicted felon, possibly mentally ill, possibly an addict. I suspect she is both uneducated and lacking in social graces. People are examining her alleged words for clues on whether she really was afraid of being scarred or not. My take on her caesarian conversation is that she was fucking ranting the way that cokeheads, drunks, and madwomen do. She probably didn’t even know what she was thinking.
So she’s easy to hate–a raving loon, a convicted child abuser. As far as we know, similiar situations may have happened: a mother refuses a caesarian or to have labor induced; subsequently, the baby dies. But the mother may have been a respectable member of the middle class. The mother may have been articulate, and explained fully her reasons for not wanting the procedure. The mother may have been accompanied by her husband or other relatives, who backed her up. The mother may have so respectable, articulate, and therefore sympathetic that the medical staff felt sorry for her. They never made the call to the authorities. They never even tested the baby for traces of drug and alcohol exposure.
But this raving loon, who doesn’t even attempt to appear cooperative. She’s fair game.
So what’s your point, Sugaree? I’m not being sarcastic here - I really don’t see a point in your post, but I am interested in knowing where you were going with it. What I’m getting from your post is that people who act like psychotic criminals will get treated like psychotic criminals and people who don’t won’t. I don’t see a problem so far.
So a raving loon who declines a c-section that doctors deem necessary should be treated as a psychotic criminal.
My (theoretical) articulate, respectable woman who declines a c-section that doctors deem necessary should not be treated as a psychotic criminal.
I see a huge problem there.
Okay, now what do you say about the charges? It seems, at least to me, that this implies the boy died via coke. I may be wrong, but I somehow doubt it. So what now?
It would be more of a “grey area” if the charges filed against this woman were because of the coke in the baby’s system. But, according to the DA’s testimony to the press, she’s being criminally prosecuted due to the fact that she refused to have a C-section, and one of her babies died. That’s a problem, and opens a gaping hole in a woman’s right to preserve her bodily autonomy.
The DA’s trying this woman in the press, giving the details out about her that he knows will be most sure to grab the public’s outrage. Babys dying from a mother’s drug abuse just doesn’t do it as easily and completely any more, so he threw that in. I hope it turns around and bites him.
So if he’s “giving the details out about her that he knows will be most sure to grab the public’s outrage”…I assume you mean he’s holding back the other details?
He “threw in” the reports from the nurses/doctors and hospitals (the reports that probably initiated these proceedings)…thats what you’re claiming…right?
I assume you can offer some support for that assertion…or is this one of those Pit thingees where we get to say anything…label it as “our opinion, only” and let it stand?
I’m confused about what that document is supposed to prove. It’s an affidavit from a police officer explaining why he thinks she used drugs during her pregnancy. My image of the woman is someone who is uneducated, ill-informed, and likely mentally ill. It’s not exactly uncommon for such people (or people who are educated, well informed, and mentally healthy) to smoke pot. Hardly makes her a murderer.
Ah, I think I see where you’re going with this - the discrepancy in the treatment for the same behaviour for the less-than-wholesome citizen versus the more traditional type of person. Your characterization of Rowland as a “raving loon” leaves the door open for questions about her abilities to make decisions for herself and her babies. An articulate, respectable woman would be more likely to be assumed to have her faculties intact, and be properly processing information to make proper decisions for herself and her babies. Still, they both ended up doing the same thing, if not necessarily for the same reasons - should they be treated the same? That is a good question. If the behaviour is wrong for anyone, should it be wrong for everyone?
I cannot prove that is what the DA is doing, nor can you disprove it. However, it is not an uncommon tactic being used. Of course I know he’s holding back details, he has to, doesn’t he? I never said I didn’t find the woman’s actions morally wrong. I did state, that I thought they stemmed from a place other than vanity more then once. I have also said that I find it disturbing that one gender’s right to decide what is done medically to their body is being erroded by this litigation, and that I felt that once one gender’s rights are erroded, the other gender’s rights would follow. I have not shown myself to be ignorant, passionate yes, but not ignorant.
That’s the thing, morally wrong is not necessarily legally wrong, nor should it be. When it comes to “morals” we humans do tend to “cut slack” for those who are deficient in their abilities to discern morally right from morally wrong. We also do this to some extent when applying laws. We as a nation, are more lenient then some countries, and stricter than others. (The UK’s laws about post partum depression turned tragedy come to mind.)
Take that question you asked a little bit further featherlou, and apply it to people who refuse to donate organs to someone they know, and presumeably love/are related to. Should we begin prosecuting such morally wrong decisions criminally, or should we let people retain the right to refuse a medical procedure on their own body, even if it would save the life of another?
Yes, that’s where I’m going. The poor and the socially unacceptable (addicts, the insane) always get the short end of the stick; that’s life. Justice is administered by humans; thus, justice is not always blind. While Rowland’s behavior certainly appears to be reprehensible, I find it hard to believe that she is the first pregnant woman who disregarded medical advice and subsequently lost the baby. Is this case indeed precedent-setting (scary thought) and we are going to bind all pregnant women to their doctor’s will, or only the ones, like Rowland, deemed to be unlikeable?
sugaree Exactly. It’s not going to be overnight that everyone’s rights are noticeably erroded. It’ll start small, and for most people, in a way that’s not objectionable. Until a “stickler for fairness” comes along, who is so morally outraged that such an incident happened regardless of circumstances, that they actually find it worthy of criminally prosecuting. They’ll want everyone to be prosecuted equally, they’ll demand it. They’ll point to Rowland’s case, and use it as a precedent, and the next woman will be brought to trial. The next woman to be prosecuted for this, might not be so “unlikeable”. That WILL open the door for personal autonomy to be seriously compromised, because more “sticklers” will come forth, with cases that are offshoots of this one.
Either a person has a legally protected right to refuse serious medical procedures on their body, or they don’t. There really isn’t a “middle ground” in which only certain procedures can be “forced” on you. Once it becomes legal to make you get one kind of surgery, then it is in essence legal to make you get any kind of surgery, because someone will come along, and argue in court that it should be, and make it so.
I’ll point out, that AFAIK, no other “free” countries have laws like this. China makes women get abortions if they get pregnant a second time without goverment permission. (I believe they can in some cases get special permission to try for a boy child, but it’s rarely given.)
Look at Eugenics as a type of example highlighting what I mean. Some states would “sterilize” the poor because they were thought of as inferior. Criminals, people who were mentally ill, and people who were deformed, or otherwise “genetically flawed” were also sterilized. People with jobs, who weren’t poor or ill, had no problem with this, because they felt it wouldn’t affect them.
I’m reasonably certain it would have eventually “snowballed” and affected them, because it was the Government determining what factors made a person worthy of “sterilization”. It had already grown from preventing the criminals and mentally ill from breeding, to including the poor, I wonder who would have been included in the list next? Jewish people, Irish people, short or fat people? I’m very glad that law was overturned. But the fact that it was, also lends credence to my arguement that to force a person to have surgery against their will is against the Constitution as it’s enacted by various laws and court findings.
#1 - The babies were removed via c-section.
#2 - Both the baby and the mother tested positive for cocaine.
#3 - The officer was at the hospital ‘to investigate a report that a woman had given birth to twins who had been exposed to cocaine.’
Doesn’t prove anything - but it does paint a different picture than the one we’d been discussing. I still don’t think anyone should be forced to undergo a medical procedure, for any reason.
I looked through the previous posts, and didn’t see this. I f someone already posted it, though, sorry for being repetitive!
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3504720.stm
“I’ve never refused a C-section. I’ve already had two prior C-sections. Why would I say something like that?” Ms Rowland said.
If this is true, it raises a lot of questions; the “stem to stern” line, for instance becomes even more improbable.
I’m not sure if this changes anyones opinion-- hell, I’m not sure it changes MY opinion, except to make the information evenless clear-- but at least now it’s out there.