holzman_tweed | (no subject)

(no subject)

Get on the horn to your congress critters about this one early and often. A woman in Utah is being charged with murder on the grounds that she refused a C-section and her baby was stillborn.

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i just finished reading about that and my thoughts were, "WTF".

cs

Crikey.

April 25. Washington D.C.
March for Women's Lives
http://www.ppaction.org/PPMarch04/join.html

I start to think, it's a crazy Utah thing. (I lived in one of its neighbouring states for 21 years.) But then I fear it's not -- it's a conservative backlast thing. And I grow very fearful.

Unbelievable. My first thoughts were that maybe the Drs. were afraid of being sued so they turned the case around. And I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I can't think of anything else that does either.

I worked in this industry (L&D; neonatalICU) for 10 years. I've never heard of anything like this.

This seems to be just one more example of late of our country trying to regulate a variety of our morals. Its scary, and frustrating. And I fear only going to continue to get worse.

There's a lot more to the story than that. I still don't think it's a good precedent to set, but it's not just a simple "I don't want to have surgery" situation.

I posted another URL for this elsewhere: http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Mar/03122004/utah/147031.asp

The living twin was already taken away from her for other reasons (and she is in jail over that).

I may be missing something, but the article you post indicates the living twin was taken from her "shortly after giving birth in mid-January on a child endangerment charge involving the surviving twin." It's not clear that the child endangerment charge arises from anything other than the same theory leading to the murder charge.

I don't see anything in the rest of the article that makes me think it's OK to charge her with murder or child endangerment, either, unless we're going to completely exclude pregnant women from the notion that patients and parents get to make medical decisions for themselves and their children respectively, including the decision to accept a risk of death in favor of a given treatment. I think it's difficult to understate just how bad an idea that is.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's enough evidence present that the state could have sought to have her declared mentally incompetent and then had a court appointed custodian make the decision to operate, but that's completely different.

Crap. That may be the wrong URL and I can't find it now. The mother is a drug user (that's why the surviving twin was taken away and why she is in jail) who has a history of violent mental illness and abuse.

Again...I don't want the precedent established that we'd force people to have surgery or not let them make their own decisions. But this woman is NOT exactly innocent, either. It's not black and white.

A simple explanation of the story: http://tv.ksl.com/index.php?nid=5&sid=80598

A bit more background: http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,8953392%255E1702,00.html

According to CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/West/03/12/mother.charged.ap/index.html at one hospital, "Rowland left after signing a document stating that she understood that leaving might result in death or brain injury to one or both twins, the doctor told police." - so presumably at that time nobody was telling her that she might face criminal charges. Doesn't that make the doctor an accessory to murder for not getting the police to detain her?

Of course, one side-effect of this will be women avoiding pre-natal care, since they might get in trouble for ignoring advice they didn't want to take.

I have trouble seeing this as a clear cut issue. The pregnancy was far enough along that the fetuses were fully developed, which is where I can see a good argument being made to treat them as separate entities with rights apart from their mother. Given that, it could be argued that there is little difference between this situation and a mother refusing to get medical care for a sick child, the only complication being that a surgical procedure is required of the mother. I have trouble with just assuming that the rights of the mother completely overrule the rights of the fetuses. Certainly, as with any situation where the rights of two or more individuals conflict, someone's rights are going to have to bend. I just don't see it as being as clear cut as the outrage implies.

Eric Christian Berg

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