Posted: 19 Mar 2016 12:46 PM PDT
Photo
credit: The Irish Times By Jerry Coyne Most of you probably remember
the tragic and preventable death of Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year old
dentist who died in Ireland in 2012, killed by the policies of the
Catholic Church. The story is well known: Halappanavar contracted a
serious infection at 17 weeks of pregnancy, one that would kill both her
and the fetus if it were not removed. Grania’s post gives more details:
Her husband recounts that repeated requests for termination (in
reality, an evacuation of the uterus) were refused because
the fetal heartbeat was still present, and they were told, “this is a
Catholic country”. She was left with a dilated cervix for three days
until the fetal heartbeat ceased. Four days later
[Halappanavar] died. It wasn’t until a year later that it became legal
in Ireland to abort a fetus to save the mother’s life! This almost
happened in 2010 in the U.S., to a Michigan resident named Tamisha
Means, who now tells her story in The Guardian. Means was 18 weeks
pregnant and started to miscarry, but was refused admittance to Mercy
Health Muskegon, a Catholic hospital. Bleeding copiously and in
terrible pain, Means went back to Mercy (an inappropriate name!) the
next day, and was once again refused admission. The next day
she returned to the hospital for the third time, and only then, when she
started going into labor on the spot, was she admitted. The baby died,
but, no thanks to Mercy, Ms. Means survived. Apparently, doctors could
have told her that her child had no chance of survival and terminated
her pregnancy, but they didn’t. They withheld crucial information. As
Means writes in her article: Mercy Health Muskegon is a Catholic
hospital required to follow policies drafted by the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops. As the Guardian recently reported, they
have religious directives that guide their medical treatment and
decision-making, which includes prohibiting healthcare workers from
administering any treatment or information that could result in
pregnancy termination. That includes decisions where the woman’s life is
at risk, as mine was, and the baby could not yet live outside of the
womb, as mine couldn’t. I was not seeking to end my pregnancy. I was
seeking proper medical care. I didn’t have control over my miscarriage,
but the hospital had control over the care I would receive at that
devastating time. Instead of acting in my best interest, religious
beliefs were used to deny me the right type of medical care. This is
insupportable. As the Guardian reports at the link above, five different
women had their lives endangered in a year and a half by Mercy’s
refusal to terminate their pregnancies. In all five cases, the babies
died. The religious directives governing such cases are ambiguous, and
it looks as if Catholic health workers simply make judgment calls.
Source: https://whyevolutionistrue.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment