World News Korner

Woman suffers unnecessarily for three days due to dangerous complications with her pregnancy, after being sent home by Catholic hospital.

Courtesy of ACLU:

Tamesha was only 18 weeks pregnant when her water broke prematurely. She rushed to Mercy Health—the only hospital within half an hour of where she lived. The hospital did not tell her then that she had little chance of a successful pregnancy, that she was at risk if she tried to continue the pregnancy, and that the safest course of care in her case was to end it. The hospital simply sent her home.

She came back the next day, bleeding and in pain, and again was turned away. Again, she was not told of the risks of trying to continue the pregnancy, or what her treatment options were. Tamesha returned yet a third time—by now suffering a significant infection. The hospital was prepared to send her away once more, when she started to deliver.

Tamesha's baby died within hours of being born—at 18 weeks, it never had a chance.

How could something like this happen? Because Mercy Health is Catholic-sponsored, it is required to adhere to the "Ethical and Religious Directives," a set of rules created by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to govern the provision of medical care at Catholic-run hospitals. At hospitals like Mercy Health, the Directives are put above medical standards of care.

The Directives prohibit Catholic-sponsored facilities from providing vital health services and the information patients need to make informed decisions about their health care, and from honoring patients' wishes when they conflict with Catholic directives. This is true even if as in Tamesha's case, compliance with the Directives pose a direct threat to patient health.

Because of the Directives, Tamesha was never told the truth about her situation—that her fetus had little chance of surviving, that by attempting to continue the pregnancy she risked her own health, and that completing the miscarriage and ending the pregnancy was the safest approach for a woman in her condition. All that information was withheld from her. Nor was she told that because of the Directives, the hospital would refuse to provide her the safest course of care—even to protect her health. Tamesha never had the chance to direct the course of her care or make a real decision.

I am sorry but when your faith endangers the life of a fellow human being then your faith needs to take a back door to ethical and moral medical considerations.

In this case the baby was not going to live no matter what happened, yet they sent a woman home to suffer and potentially die during childbirth rather than go against church doctrine.

We need to get away from this religious definition of life, and go back to the scientific one, that suggests that life only truly viable once a fetus is capable of surviving outside of the mother, and that does not happen until around the 23rd to 26th week of life. If THAT were the accepted standard then all of this BS about the morning after pill and hospitals refusing to offer life saving abortions would be a non-issue.

I guess being an immoral Atheist I will never understand why there is more importance placed on the survival of a bundle of cells over the life of actual living, breathing human beings in this country.

There are people in this country who would literally allow children to have their mother die in excruciating agony rather than risk the potential life of their unborn sibling. That is a type of "morality" that I will never understand.

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