I don't understand the completely unnecessary cynicism in this comment.
Do you really believe that everyone working in maternity wards in hospitals cares absolutely nothing about babies?
Do you really believe that everyone working in maternity wards in hospitals cares absolutely nothing about babies?
The "won't let mom walk to the door" thing is a great microcosm of that—it's a blanket policy applied to all mothers regardless of need.
My wife had our youngest at home but we had to take her to the hospital afterward because her lungs were a little sticky and she needed a respirator for ~4 hours. I took our daughter in and my wife followed a few hours later, walking all the way into the hospital.
The NICU wouldn't discharge us for two days (which is a whole liability > care story of its own), but when they finally did they insisted that my wife—who had had the baby at home and driven to and walked into the hospital while mere hours postpartum—needed to be in a wheelchair to the curb.
We liked that shift of nurses, they clearly cared, but no one in that room looked at my wife standing by the warmer and thought "she needs a wheelchair". They had a checklist and they were going to be darn sure they followed it.
I've definitely been in hospital situations with my children where I was honestly afraid (perceived or real threat, I still don't know) that they were going to report me for child abuse if I took my kids home and refused care. People with authority are kinda scary, and while I love for us to all choose rights over security, sometimes I just don't want to have to fight for everything.
And this is where police states evolve from.
Holding someone for longer than the traffic stop requires to wait for a drug dog is illegal in the USA. That's not to say it never happens, but it's grounds to exclude any evidence found, and for a lawsuit.
The judge won't be amused if the police say it took them 45 minutes to write a speeding ticket.
I've definitely been detained for what seemed to me an acceptable amount of time for a traffic stop, but who's to say the cop can't come up with myriad reasons it had to take that long? Is 35 minutes too long? Is 38 minutes? Who's keeping time, and who's word is taken as truth?
The increased use of car and body cameras makes this particular abuse harder to get away with. A request to search denied followed by a call for a dog, followed by unusual delays recorded on dashcam leads to a challenge even the most overworked public defender would raise.
If its a black man in a poor part of town driving a cheap car your success rate in getting away with it will be 100%.
I'm not saying it never happens, but the legal risk is too high for most cops to do it often. They may try to get you to think they will, but it's usually a bluff.
I can see an argument that it's about increasing average wellness across all people ever taken care of by that NICU, but from the perspective of an individual patient there's no difference between the two motivations—the point is that your own care is not the important thing to the hospital at that time, what's important is the rules and regulations.
In our case, we both felt that our care was actually actively hampered by NICU discharge rules that were designed for premature babies and were completely inappropriate for our late-term baby. The wheelchair was just the last hurrah of the situationally-inappropriate hospital regulations.
I suspect this is one such case.
Is the risk sufficiently on a per-step basis to make that worth it?
For them to be so soulless when it concerns infants, you can be sure they aren't any better when they're just dealing with adults. Greedy psychopaths are overrepresented in the medical industry.