Woman 'denied a termination' dies in hospital

[seekerz]

First, we do not know that medical intervention would have helped. We simply do not know enough about the facts of the case to say one way or the other.

Secondly, *yes, *sometimes medical treatment is limited by issues of morality. We have to accept that. We have to accept that *sometimes people die. *We do not say of someone who dies because of lack of a heart transplant, gee, why didn’t they just kill someone to get a heart for this person, do we? And yet in this case, we say, Gee, why didn’t we just kill the baby?

The whole entire point is that we should not kill unborn babies any more than we should kill those who are already born. We should not kill patients who are dying because their organs could save lives, and we all recognize that. But we do not recognize that we should not directly kill babies, even those who are dying, and that we should be very careful in acting in a way which would kill the baby indirectly when treating the mother.

The whole point is, if it were an abortion we would have plenty to say. A woman died who could have had intervention sooner, the discussion is salient and necessary. What should be done in hypothetical similar situations? Is there moral culpability for delaying life-saving treatment for either mother or baby? If the baby had been dying and things which could have been done were not done because of risk to a dying mother’s life, would that be immoral? There are at least two lives in every pregnancy.

 

[St_Francis]

If they could save the mother and did not, they would be charged with manslaughter, no two ways about it.

Jim

it seems to be awfully rare for doctors to be charged with manslaughter, but in a nation in which the murder of innocent unborn children is illegal, *as it should be, *those who performed the abortion at the hospital would have been charged for that death…

 

[Angelsflight]

The serial killer is guilty, I (and others in the room) are innocent. I’d rather not have you kill me (and others) in order to kill him as well, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to be murdered under the excuse that otherwise the serial killer would have killed dozens more, while this way I was the only victim, and 1 < 12. That’s sort of cold. Of course, even in just war there is always an amount of collateral damage that is unavoidable, but in order to be sort of acceptable it has to be truly unavoidable.

ok yeah, but I was mostly referring to this part of your post:

You do not murder in order to stop murder. You do not do evil in order to stop evil.

If someone was killing you, I would want to save you…and i wouldnt just watch and do nothing and let someone harm you for the sake of “not doing evil”

So, in regards to this case, if a baby is dying, and will kill its mother in the process, do we stand by and watch BOTH die? Or do we save who we can?

 

[seekerz]

St Francis

The problem was, the mother could not survive induced labor because the pregnancy was causing the condition, so it was either a D&C or let the mother die along with the 11 week old fetus.

The doctors said that they could not just sit back and watch the mother and fetus die.

In fact, they would’ve been charged with manslaughter had they done so.

Theologians are calling the Church to review the issue and to come to a better conclusion than what they have now.

Jim

I’m with those theologians. There seems to be little correlation between what is considered licit in some conditions and what is not considered licit in others.

This particular case involved infection, but what if she had been miscarrying and bleeding heavily? Would she have been allowed to bleed to death with a heartbeat present and what of the fate of the docs (assuming they would allow that)?

 

[St_Francis]

The whole point is, if it were an abortion we would have plenty to say. A woman died who could have had intervention sooner, the discussion is salient and necessary. What should be done in hypothetical similar situations? Is there moral culpability for delaying life-saving treatment for either mother or baby? If the baby had been dying and things which could have been done were not done because of risk to a dying mother’s life, would that be immoral? There are at least two lives in every pregnancy.

I have done my very best to explain these issues to you but apparently have not succeeded. I apologize for my inability to do so, and hope that you will find some answers.

 

[seekerz]

A theologian in the Catholic Free Press wrote an article on the St. Joseph’s case and the double effect principle.

In the article, he gives a scenario where there is a burning building. The firefighters rush into the building and discover that their is a collapse where a large unconscious man is blocking the way to a three year old child in the room behind him. The only way for the firefighters can save the little girl is to kill the man by cutting his body apart so they can clear the passageway to the little girl. If they don’t do this, both the little girl and the man are going to die.

Under the double effect principle, it would be morally wrong for the firefighters to kill the man, in order to save the little girl.

So it is the case in this pregnancy. They can not perform an eivl, i,e, the direct abortion, in order to satisfy a good, saving the mother.

Now, the problem I have with this is, an unviable fetus is not the same as an adult human being, who has responsibilities to other people.

In the case of the St. Joseph’s Hospital, the mother was married with four other children to raise. It would seem to me that her value trumps the 11 week old fetus when it comes to saving her life. The Church however, sees the 11 week old fetus as having equal value as the mother and therefore you can not directly kill the fetus to save the mother, even though both will end up dying as a result of the doctors non-action.

Jim

It doesn’t even have to be about value of lives, a topic I would have much difficulty even discussing. The facts as we have them in this case is that the baby would have died in the womb or out of it, so what is the moral objection to delivery if the intent is to save the mother? Leaving the baby inside is not going to save its life - neither is delivering it.

My big problem with these cases is the idea of doing nothing to save a life which can be saved. How would a person answer to God for that? Seems to me there is a choice between a sin of commission and a sin of omission.

 

[seekerz]

I have done my very best to explain these issues to you but apparently have not succeeded. I apologize for my inability to do so, and hope that you will find some answers.

No need to apologize - you are not personally responsible. Just look at my forum name. That’s the whole reason I’m here.

 

[seekerz]

Maybe the only “foggy part” you see is the moral aspect, but I can think of several other “foggy parts” in dealing with a miscarrying woman with a possible infection. What is the source of her infection? Is it the uterus, or somewhere else? How quickly does she appear to be miscarrying (subjective measurement there of course)? Prior medications? Allergies??

Lots of foggy stuff to be found if you know what to look for.

AND THEN there is the moral issue of doing harm to a living prenatal baby to save mom’s life.

All of what you mention precede determining a working diagnosis, a matter usually accomplished in the first half hour of hospital stay.

Doing harm can come from acting or from not acting. Besides, the parents were told very early (second day), that the baby was not going to live: in the womb or outside of it. The only real moral question I see is, would delivery have been justified?

 

[mharren]

This unfortunate case violates medical ethics. The mother’s health is always to be put before the child’s, especially before the age of viability (20 weeks). At 17 weeks the child most assuredly would not have survived but I see no reason why if ‘abortion’ was out of the question, labour could not have been induced (or the child delivered by Caesarean section) to save the life of the mother and then all measures taken to try and keep the baby alive. It was quite obvious that keeping the child in the mother was not going to save the child so if there was any possibility of doing so, perhaps it would have been best to do the above. At the very least, the Mother could have been spared (at least it would have been more likely).

Unfortunately now people are dead, and unjustly so. Nature had determined that the child was not to survive and the mother was already having a spontaneous abortion. When spontaneous abortions occur it is not all the uncommon for it to be ‘incomplete’, sometimes severely like this case, or less severely such as left-over remnants of the child or placental tissue after a miscarriage and abortion procedures such as D&C need to be used to clear out the dead remnants.

That this woman developed septicemia leads me to believe that while the child may still have had a heart beat, it or parts of the extra-embryonic tissue were infected. The exchange of blood through the shared circulatory system of the placenta likely lead to the poisoning of the mothers blood, which lead to her death. In fact the continuation of the fetal heart to beat may have hastened the progress of septicemia when parts of the child or extra-embryonic tissue were dead.

This should have been aborted or at least delivered with all attempts to preserve life taken after delivery. IMPO.

Regards,
-Mharren

 

[JimR-OCDS]

it seems to be awfully rare for doctors to be charged with manslaughter, but in a nation in which the murder of innocent unborn children is illegal, *as it should be, *those who performed the abortion at the hospital would have been charged for that death…

It’s rare because doctors don’t sit back and do nothing when a woman’s life is at stake, because its against the law.

If a doctor comes upon an accident where there are victims and he doesn’t try to help. he’ll be charged with negligence and even manslaughter if it saving the life of the person would’ve been routine for the doctor.

In order to ensure doctors would help without risk to themselves, most states have Good Samaritan laws where a doctor who tries to help a victim but fails, can not be sued.

Jim

 

[NovusAugustus]

The question here is whether it is established as medical certainty that delaying an inevitable misscarriage will cause a deadly infection. If it is will established as highly probable that waiting for an inevitable misscarriage with the womb opened will cause a critical infection, then it stands to reason that the child should be humanely removed and allowed to die outside the confines of the mother’s womb in order to protect her life. If it were possible to easily prevent a deadly infection by some means that I am ignorant of and allow the child to pass away in the intervening period, such a path would be preferable. But if no such insurance of the woman’s safety can be obtained, the child should be allowed to die outside the womb to insure the mother’s safety.

Pray for them.

 

[Ghosty]

This unfortunate case violates medical ethics. The mother’s health is always to be put before the child’s, especially before the age of viability (20 weeks). At 17 weeks the child most assuredly would not have survived but I see no reason why if ‘abortion’ was out of the question, labour could not have been induced (or the child delivered by Caesarean section) to save the life of the mother and then all measures taken to try and keep the baby alive. It was quite obvious that keeping the child in the mother was not going to save the child so if there was any possibility of doing so, perhaps it would have been best to do the above. At the very least, the Mother could have been spared (at least it would have been more likely).

Unfortunately now people are dead, and unjustly so. Nature had determined that the child was not to survive and the mother was already having a spontaneous abortion. When spontaneous abortions occur it is not all the uncommon for it to be ‘incomplete’, sometimes severely like this case, or less severely such as left-over remnants of the child or placental tissue after a miscarriage and abortion procedures such as D&C need to be used to clear out the dead remnants.

That this woman developed septicemia leads me to believe that while the child may still have had a heart beat, it or parts of the extra-embryonic tissue were infected. The exchange of blood through the shared circulatory system of the placenta likely lead to the poisoning of the mothers blood, which lead to her death. In fact the continuation of the fetal heart to beat may have hastened the progress of septicemia when parts of the child or extra-embryonic tissue were dead.

This should have been aborted or at least delivered with all attempts to preserve life taken after delivery. IMPO.

Regards,
-Mharren

This is what I don’t understand, and typically I can follow moral logic fairly well. I don’t think D&C is ever permitted, but why not delivery of the child as an outside shot at saving it? Disregarding the mother vs. child factor, if the child will certainly die in the womb then how is pre-viability delivery immoral. I’m not talking about delivering the child and then leaving it on a cold table, but rather doing whatever longshot means of treatment or comfort possible. Who knows, perhaps techniques would be stumbled upon that would push viability back another couple of months.

Obviously every case is unique, with different medical complications involved. I’m speaking purely of a hypothetical situation in which the child is “doomed in the womb”. What if the mother is certainly dying within the next day or two, and is 17 weeks pregnant. Do you say you won’t even try to deliver the child because it has almost no chance outside the womb? How does that make any sense?

Peace and God bless!

 

[seekerz]

This is what I don’t understand, and typically I can follow moral logic fairly well. I don’t think D&C is ever permitted, but why not delivery of the child as an outside shot at saving it? Disregarding the mother vs. child factor, if the child will certainly die in the womb then how is pre-viability delivery immoral. I’m not talking about delivering the child and then leaving it on a cold table, but rather doing whatever longshot means of treatment or comfort possible. Who knows, perhaps techniques would be stumbled upon that would push viability back another couple of months.

Obviously every case is unique, with different medical complications involved. I’m speaking purely of a hypothetical situation in which the child is “doomed in the womb”. What if the mother is certainly dying within the next day or two, and is 17 weeks pregnant. Do you say you won’t even try to deliver the child because it has almost no chance outside the womb? How does that make any sense?

Peace and God bless!

Exactly. Those are the same questions I have. How could it be immoral to deliver when death is the predictable option either way? Granted, delivery by normal means may be difficult or impossible at this stage.

The reverse situation, with mother dying and baby’s life amenable to being saved by a procedure risky to the mother, also needs consideration.

 

[mharren]

This is what I don’t understand, and typically I can follow moral logic fairly well. I don’t think D&C is ever permitted, but why not delivery of the child as an outside shot at saving it? Disregarding the mother vs. child factor, if the child will certainly die in the womb then how is pre-viability delivery immoral. I’m not talking about delivering the child and then leaving it on a cold table, but rather doing whatever longshot means of treatment or comfort possible. Who knows, perhaps techniques would be stumbled upon that would push viability back another couple of months.

Obviously every case is unique, with different medical complications involved. I’m speaking purely of a hypothetical situation in which the child is “doomed in the womb”. What if the mother is certainly dying within the next day or two, and is 17 weeks pregnant. Do you say you won’t even try to deliver the child because it has almost no chance outside the womb? How does that make any sense?

Peace and God bless!

There are things that can be done if a child is delivered prematurely, usually nothing is done before the age of viability (which is also the age after which elective abortion is no longer an option) such as putting the child on a ventilator, nasogastric feeding tube or IV nutrition, oxygenation, specialized incubators, etc. By law, during an abortion, if the infant was not successfully killed prior to the procedure (by law Infanticide must proceed the delivery procedure when some form of ‘delivery’ is required) and signs of life are discovered once the cervix has been dilated or the abdomen and uterus opened then the child must be treated as if viable and all methods available to help save the life must be taken, even if it is statistically impossible to do anything but prolong the life.

When I was talking about D&C for incomplete abortion you must understand that dilation and curettage is a procedure in itself that is not just used to terminate a pregnancy. Sometimes a woman may lose the child via miscarriage (spontaneous abortion) but the discharge of the fetus and the extra-embryonic tissues was incomplete. This can lead to grave illness in the women, including septicemia and damage to the uterus and cervix that could complicate further reproductive attempts. Thus we must go in, dilate the cervix to gain access (if it is not still sufficiently dilated) and use a curettage to ‘scrap’ the uterus.

I have had patients in the ER who have needed a D&C after an incomplete spontaneous abortion and been very morally conflicted because they have been taught that D&C=Abortion and therefore even though there is no longer a baby (or at least most of the baby is gone) they would be morally remiss if they consented to the D&C. It is a delicate matter and I personally would love to know what - if anything - the Church teaches about a D&C done in the case of an incomplete spontaneous abortion. Or what the church teaches about delivering a still-born when we confirm the baby has died in utero and needs to be removed either through induced vaginal delivery or through a hysterotomy.

In a situation like the one this woman and her baby and her husband and her physicians found themselves in, I think choosing to deliver the child when she arrived at the hospital and they determined that she was undergoing a spontaneous abortion would have been the best compromise, and that they should have taken measures to try and save the baby, even though it’s extremely unlikely the baby would have lived long if it survived delivery (as I suspect parts of it may already have been ‘dead’), that way at least the mother’s life could have been saved, and the physicians would have done their best to try and save the baby or at least prolong it’s life and no ‘abortion’ would have been performed.

I’m thinking about a thread I read here in the last few days about baby’s with anencephaly (no head/brain) where I argued that unless carrying the unviable child to term was placing the mother at acute risk then there was no harm in allowing the child to be born. The child would die anyway, or perhaps survived for a few hours to a few days on radical life support, but no ‘abortion’ would have been performed.

Regards,
-Mharren

 

[St_Francis]

This unfortunate case violates medical ethics. The mother’s health is always to be put before the child’s, especially before the age of viability (20 weeks). At 17 weeks the child most assuredly would not have survived but I see no reason why if ‘abortion’ was out of the question, labour could not have been induced (or the child delivered by Caesarean section) to save the life of the mother and then all measures taken to try and keep the baby alive. It was quite obvious that keeping the child in the mother was not going to save the child so if there was any possibility of doing so, perhaps it would have been best to do the above. At the very least, the Mother could have been spared (at least it would have been more likely).

**Given the facts we know, ** I disagree. The mother came to the hospital in the midst of a miscarriage on Sunday, but showed no signs of infection until Wednesday night. Since the doctors thought on Friday (the day after the baby had died and the mother been operated on) that the mother would recover from the very serious reactions she was having to the infection, it seems that before the baby died, they never thought her condition to be life-threatening.

Remember that this is in Ireland, where the law at least tried to mandate that *Catholic *medical ethics be followed rather than in the US.

Unfortunately now people are dead, and unjustly so. Nature had determined that the child was not to survive and the mother was already having a spontaneous abortion. When spontaneous abortions occur it is not all the uncommon for it to be ‘incomplete’, sometimes severely like this case, or less severely such as left-over remnants of the child or placental tissue after a miscarriage and abortion procedures such as D&C need to be used to clear out the dead remnants.

That this woman developed septicemia leads me to believe that while the child may still have had a heart beat, it or parts of the extra-embryonic tissue were infected. The exchange of blood through the shared circulatory system of the placenta likely lead to the poisoning of the mothers blood, which lead to her death. In fact the continuation of the fetal heart to beat may have hastened the progress of septicemia when parts of the child or extra-embryonic tissue were dead.

In one of the numerous things I have read related to this case, it seemed that the infection arose because of the length of labor rather than from the baby. When she arrived at the hospital, she showed no signs of infection.

 

[Ghosty]

Yes, I should be more precise in my use of D&C; I’m referring to killing the child and removing the remains with D&C. The problem in these discussions is that medical use of terms is often different from the common use of terms, something I’m acutely aware of having worked in emergency medicine.

I’m with both of you, however: deliver the child, circumstances permitting, and treat both mother and child as potentially viable. So long as the intention isn’t to kill the child, directly or indirectly, but rather to at least try to save both I can’t see the moral problem. Just leaving the child aside to die after delivery, without even attempting care or comfort, would certainly be wrong, IMO. If my wife and child are dying together, however, and the pregnancy is the millstone dragging them both down, I would want the child delivered and treated along with my wife; if they certainly can’t be treated and saved as a unit, then seperate them and try to treat and save them both as individuals.

Peace and God bless!

 

[Ghosty]

Let me just add that we won’t know how to make a 17-week child viable unless some experience is had in trying to help them outside the womb. We can’t go around inducing labor at 17-weeks to practice lifesaving medical techniques, but we can make efforts when the unfortunate circumstances arise. There was a time when 22 weeks would have been universally inviable, but with experience and advancements we pushed back viability. I see no reason to simply stop at an arbitrary gestation date and call everything before that inviable.

I’m not saying this applies in this terrible, heartwrenching case. I just think we may be shooting ourselves in the foot. My prayers go out to this woman, her lost child, and her family.

 

[St_Francis]

I have done my very best to explain these issues to you but apparently have not succeeded. I apologize for my inability to do so, and hope that you will find some answers.

No need to apologize - you are not personally responsible. Just look at my forum name. That’s the whole reason I’m here.

I realized that what I said was incomplete. When I first returned to the Church, I had a lot of questions like yours, but this was before the internet had taken off and so I had trouble finding answers. I prayed a lot about these troubling issues, and God granted me the grace to understand from a different perspective, sometimes in a quick way which I noticed, and sometimes in a gradual way which I did not notice immediately.

God bless you in your search!

 

[JimR-OCDS]

FYI, a 17 week old fetus can not survive birth. That is, they can not survive the delivery process, much less outside the womb.

Been there done that, sad to say.

Jim

 

[pepipop]

FYI

There is an OB/GYN Professor, from Northern Ireland (UK), discussing the case at the moment, on TV. He has been working for 40 yrs, in his position. He said he has seen septicemia occur on numerous occasions throughout his career, either after childbirth or miscarriage. He also stated since yesterday morning, 300 women have been recorded as dying from abortion and 3000 from giving birth - he did not quote the source, but I doubt he would come onto TV and state an untrue statement considering his position/profession.

Not that this gives any clearer a picture about the case itself.