Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section | Hacker News Reader

Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section

propublica.org

53 pointsJimmc41422 comments

She was denied legal counsel - not even provided a patient advocate - and was somehow expected to represent herself while in labor - while the hospital caring for her told her she was "a bad mother" in court??

I also needed to reread that paragraph a few times but it seems a law professor was commenting on the case with an expression of what the hospital could have been thinking, not that anyone actually said anything about being a bad mother.

“You’re somebody who is a bad mother, right?” Mutcherson said. “Which is a huge part of what the thought process is here. This is not what mothers do. Mothers sacrifice, including allowing somebody to cut you open.”

You Americans have completely lost it.

Quoting this without context, people might think someone from the case said this about the expecting mother. Instead, this quote comes from a law professor (that the author interviewed maybe?), who was, I guess, projecting the thought on to those of the legal system. The author kind of stuck this right in the middle of the story, so I don't blame readers if they confused the quote with someone from the trial saying it.

I read the whole thing an hour ago and I'm still not through processing all of the pros and the cons but the thing that really stands out for me is the degradation and the lack of humanity. A hospital taking a patient to court is on a level that I can not square with the Hippocratic Oath.

During COVID there were all these people talking about 'bodily autonomy' and I felt that was overblown, vaccines are one of the best things that have happened to humanity and the only reason that a very large number of inevitably fatal or grievously harming diseases have come under control and are no longer a cause for infant mortality or lifelong paralysis.

But this is on another level, very personal and immediate and I find I can't shift my perspective to the 'common good' one here. A hospital performing surgery on you that you explicitly say you do not want and then forcing you by putting you in court through 'zoom' is such a mis-application of technology that I wonder if they remember why they are there in the first place. This does not feel like care to me.

I've been in hospital a couple of times in my life and I never had the idea that that machine that was taking care of me could turn against me. But this poor woman will most likely never want to see the inside of a hospital again.

Part of the problem is the courts. There are many laws now about protecting babies, in this case of they'd done nothing and mother and baby both died, they could be arrested for that.

Medical consent is a house that I consider holy but I draw the line at 'societal good'. This woman was at worst a risk to herself and the degree of violation here (besides the insults!) is revolting at so many levels. They had zero respect or consideration for her, their paper reality appears to have been more important to them than the flesh and blood human that trusted them enough to put herself in their power. And then they proceeded to grossly violate that trust. This is 'Terry Schiavo' in reverse, another case that had me wondering why people don't have respect for other people and allow them some dignity. There the courts were required to allow the hospital to stop a treatment they knew would never result in a patient recovering or even improving, and yet the parents tried to use the courts to force the hospital to continue to keep her alive against the wishes of the husband and the hospital.

And that took 15 years...

> they could be arrested for that

Is this real? Here in Argentina someone had a esophageal endoscopy a few years ago. The hospital used a high pressure air tank to insert air in the esophagus instead of a low pressure one. Her esophagus broke and she died for internal bleeding. She [the victim] was very well connected, an air TV journalist and a member of the council of the city of Buenos Aires (~3MM habitats, capital city). IIRC the only penalty was a 3 years sentence in parole the full time.

Perhaps we need a quantitative scoring model of whether a C-section is warranted. Obviously her "score" wasn't sufficiently high until the baby's heart rate actually dropped. In other words, a C-section shouldn't have been pushed on her until there was strong evidence, i.e. the low heart rate, and not merely suggestive evidence, to warrant it.

That quantitative score was there all along, they just took a short-cut through the courts. But you should be able to trust your medical services people to have your interests at heart first and foremost and that's where this went off the rails. This effectively prioritized the baby's health over hers, and that was her call to make, not the hospital.

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WTF? This is shameful. It’s also why I feel vaccine mandates shouldn’t be legal. We all have a fundamental right to our bodies. The government shouldn’t be able to force you to make different choices when it comes to your body.

Yes, that's precisely the thing I'm struggling with because I think vaccine mandates should be legal: it's everybody's lives at stake. But I recognize the conflict and the inconsistency.

Pregnancy isn’t contagious and C-sections do not serve as a way to slow or stop the spread of it to people that do not want it. It is one of those things that’s only hard to reconcile if the starting premise is that everything that can be expressed through words is equivalent.

That's obvious. But it is apparently not so obvious that there were people that felt the need to go to court over this and I recognize that if you enshrine bodily autonomy at one level you are going to have to argue much harder to achieve the reverse on another when it is the collective health that is at risk.

Then where is the conflict and inconsistency?

In the fact that depending on the person they will prioritize the one over the other, and may not be able to hold the two conflicting thoughts of 'my body' vs 'society's interests in our collective health' in their heads at the same time. It took me an hour or so to figure out exactly where I would draw the line, it is non-obvious to me (it is possible that I'm simply stupid but this is the kind of thing where I think snap judgments and knee jerk responses may lead to accidents).

FWIW COVID almost killed me and the vaccine came much too late, in spite of that I still had absolutely no problem getting the vaccine simply because it's a solidarity thing. Just like you're not going to go to work whilst you're contagious and so on. But I recall a lot of pointy conversations with others around that time and NL is a country where the anti-vaxx movement gained considerable ground through the way they managed to politicize (and weaponize) the skepticism around the vaccine. We have a political party here that is a very small fraction of the electorate that you could equate with the MAGA faction (or should I say republicans?) in the USA, who owe most of their votes to that era.

But if not for that vaccine I think the world would look quite a bit different today. So for collective situations I'm fine with some level of force (and to the best of my knowledge nobody actually got forced), just like we have rules for lots of other stuff. But in individual cases where the only person that is at risk of harm is the patient and absolutely nobody else the autonomy should (easily) triumph. I really don't understand what drove these medical professionals but if I had been the woman (and I'm not even a woman) I would have definitely filed a complaint with a medical ethics board about this whole thing. This should have never ever happened.

Vaccine mandates agent quite comparable to a court ordered C-section. The vaccine mandates were about employment, the State didn't force injections or send anyone to jail for not getting vaccinated. The government even had the power to fine people and didn't use it

Your continued employment as a healthcare worker, government worker or contractor, could be made conditional on vaccination status, though.

I agree it's disturbing and sad.

Vaccine mandates are more difficult. If this mother's freedom wasn't violated then she would only risk herself and her baby. If somebody doesn't take a vaccine they place risk on many other people (mostly children) who can't be vaccinated by weakening herd immunity.

Vaccines are a social responsibility like paying taxes. If you don't want vaccines, then go off-grid and stop free loading on our infrastructure and society.

I disagree. The government SHOULD be able to force people to do things to be up to standard for the good of society. Attending a basic level of public education? Maintenance of hygiene? REASONABLE actions to prevent the spread of diseases? I believe a vaccine which has been scientifically proven to have a lower risk of death than the disease it prevents qualifies as such.

Contrast the above with a case of two lives in one package. An independently functional mother and an as yet unborn child. Is it reasonable to allow the mother to risk their own life (and endanger the linked child's life) in pursuit of some belief when that risk does not spread to others? That is a very different question than one which has an impact on risk to society as a whole.

I will say, if you support enforcing a particular outcome against 'parents rights' in this case, you had better also be for more state intervention and standards upkeep with respect to ensuring that child has sufficient resources and support to become a functioning member of society. If you're willing to go that far, then I can support the logical stance of extending said support even to the point of forcing the child out of their mother against the only individual who could consent or deny consent for that effort.

Vaccine mandates are different here in so many ways.

First, there are no general mandates. The most we have from the state is mandatory vaccines to work in certain government roles or to attend public schools. Both of these have alternatives. For adults the vast majority of vaccine mandates originate from private employment. In this case she requested to be moved to a different hospital but this was denied. There was no alternative for her in this case.

Second, vaccines are far less invasive than significant abdominal surgery. This person's reasoning for avoiding a c-section was about being able to care for her newborn and other children effectively, since recovering from a c-section is a huge additional burden on top of caring for a newborn. This was not a decision made about protecting herself but a decision made about protecting her family from the consequences of her major surgery. She'd had several c-sections before (which she felt may have been unnecessary), which is why she was at risk of uterine rupture.

This is made worse by abortion bans. If you've had a prior c-section and are therefore at risk of uterine rupture, the only way out of a pregnancy in Florida past very early pregnancy is delivery. You are locked into major abdominal surgery even if you don't want the baby.

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