The following involves an ethical dilemma. It seems like the mainstream media is not being entirely honest and forthcoming about the details of this story, and so we kind of have to read between the lines to figure out what the actual issue was. A woman was 15 weeks pregnant with twins. The placenta prematurely broke, and amniotic fluid started leaking out. This meant the babies were not going to be able to survive (or it was extremely unlikely). She was rushed to the hospital. Then one of the babies died. That creates a problem, because if a baby has died in the womb, it needs to come out, otherwise it will lead to an infection that will jeopardize the woman's health. The problem was there was still another baby that was alive in there. It was at a Catholic hospital, and they refused to perform an abortion, because they could still detect the baby's heartbeat. The 15 week old developing baby would not be able to survive if it was taken out of the womb. A standard abortion, to vacuum suck out the dead baby, would have ended up killing the live baby. I'm sure there must exist some sort of advanced medical procedure to properly deal with this type of situation, but the hospital was not equipped or the doctors did not have the expertise to do it. The woman was already bleeding, so there was urgency to do something. The woman was Anna Nusslock, age 36, from Eureka, California. The hospital was Providence St. Joseph. She was told by the doctor at the hospital that they could not provide an abortion "so long as one of the twins had detectable heart tones, unless her life was sufficiently at risk." The doctor recommended she be flown by helicopter to a hospital in San Francisco that could offer more advanced medical services. But the emergency helicopter ride would have cost $40,000 , which her health insurance would have been unlikely to cover. The doctor told her if she tried driving to San Francisco - which would have taken 5 hours by car - that she would probably hemorrhage and die before she arrived there. The woman's husband ended up driving her to Mad River Community Hospital, which was 12 miles away. By the time she arrived at the second hospital she was already hemorrhaging. This meant she needed immediate medical attention or she would die. The woman expelled one fetus, and was given an emergency abortion procedure to remove the other. Due to the economic situation, many hospitals in Northern California have been closing their doors or cutting the types of services they provide, limiting options for people living in the area, and in some cases resulting in much farther travel times. According to this study, the chances of a fetus being able to survive a premature membrane rupture at 21 weeks gestation is only 8.3%. Perinatal Outcome in Pregnancies with Extreme Preterm Premature Rupture of Membranes (Mid-Trimester PROM), Nihal Al-Riyami, Sultan Qaboos Univ Med J. 2013
Please, before you post made up rubbish can you get your facts correct? I am not going to correct you because that is futile but by my count there are at least four factual errors in your post Description of type of abortion performed Your belief that there exists “some sort of procedure” (why not Google search?) Lack of discussion on potential adverse health outcomes for the woman Discussion of impact of shared placenta with twin pregnancies Why the hell your country does not have free aeromedical transport
I can guarantee you, any country that offers "free aeromedical transport" would not value life inside the womb enough to authorize air transport in this case.
Lols! Want to put money on that? Please put money on that! https://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/sant/to-me/
I don't think you understand the issue. Any country with a socialised medical system would have just said she should get an abortion, too bad for any human life that is still alive in there! The outcome would have ended up being the same as what happened in this story. You think they are going to spend $40,000 to try to save a 15 week old fetus? If you think so, you really are naively dumb about what socialised medical care really means.
It looks like a lot of unnecessary interference by those trying to force their beliefs on someone going through a difficult time. Its her uterus.
I live in a “socialised medical system” and the opposite is true. That is because it is focussed on health outcomes not profits. We ship any patient who needs it to a tertiary care facility and pay for a relative to go with them This is the subsidy available for non urgent issues https://www.qld.gov.au/health/services/travel/subsidies. Anything urgent is taken via medical flight to the nearest facility to stabilise them and then if required taken on to the tertiary facility. A 15 week old foetus is non viable but I have seen a 2 week old baby that was born with cardiomyopathy taken across the continent to a specialist facility that could do ECMO
Yep! They are not there, they do not have the entirety of the medical records, home situation, medical expertise and experience to even begin to evaluate what can and cannot be done
This talk about "a choice between a woman and her doctors" is lie and disingenuous portrayal. When, as we all know, a woman could easily pick that 1 doctor out of 100 who will do exactly what she wants to be done. I could probably find a doctor willing to euthanize my 2-year-old, if it were legal. (Not only that, but in all the most Pro-Abortion states now, abortions can be done on women without a person who holds the credential of doctor ever physically seeing them) Anyway, if you're going to say that, and then you hold the position that government should intervene when a doctor (such as in this story) refuses to perform an abortion, then you're kind of a hypocrite.
Really? Mind you we are talking America and you don’t seem to have the same level of medical oversight as here……..
What country are we talking about? Australia? Couple aborted their baby at 28 weeks because it had a deformed left hand (happened in New South Wales, 2014 )
Again - do you know the full story? Have you had access to the medical records? Plus this is “Lifesitenews” and I know they are quoting the Brisbane times but they are also “spinning” the story and even the journalist who wrote it did not have the full story. However this was ONE single incident. One! Now at the time Victoria has no limit on age when it comes to abortion so if this was occurring regularly should there not be more than ONE incident in over ten years. Also let me note that clinical depression, which the news article stated the mother had, IS a serious life threatening condition. Plus I worked at RPA, before that time but I have worked there. Since it was illegal for an abortion to be performed after 22 weeks and RPA is a massive hospital complex in the middle of Sydney and being a public facility there would have had to be an ethics panel convened, and the more I think about it the less likely this seems
No I am saying that life threatening depression is a reason for abortion although usually they would deliver the child through caesarean, alive, which makes me think something here smells to high heaven. I looked up that syndrome and it can be associated with bilateral agenesis or failure of the kidneys to develop.
