Another vessel thrown away
It’s not pro-life, it’s anti-women. The pregnancy is everything, the woman whose pregnancy it is is nothing.
The family of a Polish woman who died on Tuesday after doctors refused to perform an abortion when the foetus’s heart stopped beating have accused the government of having “blood on their hands”.
The woman, identified only as Agnieszka T, was said to have been in the first trimester of a twin pregnancy when she was admitted to the Blessed Virgin Mary hospital in Częstochowa on 21 December. Her death comes a year after Poland introduced one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.
Don’t go to hospitals named The Blessed Virgin Mary if you can possibly help it. Try to make sure in advance that you can help it – find a secular hospital.
The first foetus died in the womb on 23 December, but doctors refused to remove it, quoting the current abortion legislation, and Agnieszka’s family claim “her state quickly deteriorated”. The hospital waited until the heartbeat of the second twin also stopped a week later, and then waited a further two days before terminating the pregnancy on 31 December.
That’s just murder. She had a decaying corpse inside her. Refusing to remove it is murder.
Her death follows that of a woman known as Izabela last September, who died after being denied medical intervention when her waters broke in the 22nd week of her pregnancy. Her family claim the 30-year-old was denied an abortion or caesarean section and that the hospital cited the country’s abortion laws. An investigation found “medical malpractice” led to Izabela’s death and the hospital was fined.
It’s Savita Halappanavar all over again.
I had a friend who’s wife had to carry a dead baby around until it was to term. I never found out why, but that sounded reckless to me then, and I was only 19. Now I know it is positively insane.
My mother and her best friend were often pregnant at the same time, and the two sets of parents were godparents to the other set of children, leading to us kids all growing up together calling the other parents Uncle and Aunt, and calling one another ‘cousin’. Both sets consisted of three girls and a boy, but my aunt should have had a boy older than me (I’m the eldest). Late in pregnancy, she stopped feeling him move, but when she contacted doctors, going increasingly desperately from her GP to hospital after hospital, she was told by everyone that there was nothing to be done; she had to carry him two weeks past term until she went into labour spontaneously and delivered him stillborn. This was in 1956 or 57 in London, England.
She never fully recovered from the trauma and grief of losing her first child that way.
I realise that my own story could so easily have ended in tragedy, like those three poor women, Savita, Izabela and Agnieszka.
Fast forward to late 1983. I’m pregnant for the fourth time; I have two very young boys (the first pregnancy was lost very early) and I am immediately really, really ill with all-day morning sickness. I am concerned that I might be carrying twins, and wondering how I’ll cope with four under-threes. Two months in, I start to bleed and am told by the GP to take bed rest. Then the pains start; but shortly fizzle out. I’m so ill I am losing weight, and even though I started out underweight at 171cm (5’7″) tall, I weighed a mere 53kg (116lbs), at five months I weigh about 45 kg (under a hundred pounds). It’s now 1984. At 30 weeks, labour starts up in earnest, I’m rushed to hospital and kept on strict bed rest on a drip to arrest labour. At 35 weeks I’m sent home, the obstetrician telling me that the amount of drug they put into me will probably mean I won’t go into spontaneous labour, but the baby will probably be big enough if I do. My cervix is 5cm dilated at this point. At around 38 weeks I have an ultrasound scan. The operator consults with a colleague; they agree that the placenta looks odd, and ‘full of holes’, but nothing further comes of it. At 42 weeks, and finally back up to my pre-pregnancy weight, I’m re-admitted for induction. Unfortunately, a series of emergency Cæsarians on other unfortunate women meant that I’m left in a labouring room all day (with nothing to eat) and then sent up to the ward at 8 pm because “It’s too late to start labour tonight”, and they’ll try again in the morning. My husband goes home. The ward staff give me a slice of toast an apologise for the kitchens being closed. Shortly after he leaves, I go into labour. I insist that they call him back; they say it’s too soon, but examine me and panic when they find out I’m already 5 cm dilated (I’ve been that way for at least seven weeks!) so they phone my wonderful friend and neighbour, who has been minding my boys, so she can tell him when he gets there.
He barely makes it back to the hospital in time; I’m in the final stages of a 115-minute (or twelve-week, with a pause button, depending on your point of view) labour. The labour goes without a hitch, and apart from my daughter having the cord around her neck and having to be pushed back temporarily to release her, she is fine. There is some confusion when I then deliver a perfectly healthy placenta.
Up on the post-natal ward, I’m becoming increasingly ill. Unlike my previous successful deliveries, where the severe after-pains led to my uterus contracting almost back to normal within hours, this time the after-pains have stopped, I’m barely passing any blood – and passing clots when I do – and my blood pressure is dropping rapidly. My last reading is 60/35; they send me home anyway, saying that the sphygmomanometer must be faulty.
Two days later, I’m in bed with blood literally (not figuratively) pumping out of me with every heart beat. As in squirting out like a water pistol. My husband has given me every towel we possess, and is downstairs frantically calling the GP, over and over. The ambulance drivers’ union is on a go-slow, so members of the public aren’t allowed to call for one. The GP finally comes out after morning surgery is over; he thought that my husband was exaggerating. He marches into the room, all hearty-like (he’s a big, tall man), says “Now then, what do we have here? Have you been overdoing things?”, pulls back the covers and folds up to the floor, like Doc Martin, with a cry of “Blimey!”
A minute later, I can hear him yelling down the phone at the ambulance operator, telling them that I’m going to die if I don’t get to the hospital immediately. They arrive less than half an hour later (we lived in a rural area; they must have driven way above the speed limit), bundle me and my daughter into the back, and I’m rushed to surgery when I get to the hospital. Several pints of blood later, and still woozy from the anæsthetic, I’m visited by a concerned surgeon worried about how I was allowed to go home with an entire, and very unhealthy, placenta inside me; didn’t the staff at delivery notice? I told them that they did deliver the whole placenta, because they showed it to me and were puzzled because it didn’t look like the one on the ultrasound. I spent another week in hospital, and then another fortnight at my parents-in-law under the ‘care’ of their GP, until my mother-in-law, worried about how sick I was still looking, calls her GP again. This time it’s a locum; he immediately diagnoses a reaction to the penicillin I’d been given post-op, changes my prescription, and the entire months-long nightmare is finally over.
Later we worked out what had happened; my daughter’s twin had died at about seven-eight weeks, but her placenta had continued to grow, thanks to the pregnancy hormones keeping my daughter alive. It was this, non-functional, placenta which they’d seen on ultrasound. Because I was so slim, it never occurred to them to look for a second placenta. In those days processing power was so weak that it took several minutes to do a scan, line by line, until a static picture was created. It looked for all the world, to me, like a photo of a de-tuned TV set. If they’d told me that they’d found the wreck of the Titanic, I would have been none the wiser. And it was the non-functioning placenta which had failed to deliver, blocked the cervix so that the uterine lining wasn’t being shed, and finally shifted and detached when I tried to return to a normal routine, rupturing a blood vessel in the process.
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I’d like to say here how much I appreciate blood donors. Were it not for my fellow O- people giving freely of their blood, I’d not be here today. So, thank you!
Tigger – fellow O- here. I thought I had messed up my typing when I was in high school biology class because there were no reactions to see. But my teacher confirmed. I do donate as often as they will allow me.
This is another example of the inexplicable rigidity of such policies causing unnecessary agonizing death. Since the Catholics fetishize suffering, they see no reason to review their policies. However, she didn’t want an abortion of a living fetus, she needed to have a dead one removed to save her life.
Yeah, that’s what I don’t get. Even if they won’t remove a living fetus, what is the purpose of leaving a dead one? Is it pro-life to allow women to die rather than violate a principle that says never remove a fetus from a woman’s body?
Of course, they won’t remove a fetus that is living even if the mother will die, and so they have two die instead of one. Some pro-life.
It’s punishment for a woman having sex and probably enjoying it.
Aww Christ, Tigger, what a horror story.
If we’re doing a collection of anecdotes, I too know of someone who had to carry a dead foetus to term and then deliver it naturally. This would have been around 15 years ago and in the UK, so no weird religious input into the healthcare system (no offense!). I seem to remember it having something to do with the psychological effect of going through the birth and then being able to say goodbye and mourn the baby properly? Sounded like crap to me, but what do I know about childbirth. Besides that it’s not for me.
Good grief Tigger, what a horrific story! I’m glad you came through the other side and I can only hope there were a bunch of doctors and nurses that took some learnings from a very near miss.
Blood donors are great and it’s such an easy thing to do. I used to donate both whole blood and plasma, but after a brush with melanoma they won’t take me any more.
Rob@7:
Really sorry to hear that (that you can no longer donate). I’m blood type AB+ so I donate plasma every month, knowing that soon enough something similar will happen to me and preclude me from doing it. You’re absolutely right that it’s easy to do, and I’m responding here like this to try to amplify that message. Giving blood is so easy, and giving plasma the same (only it takes a little longer).
People with blood type O- are the best for whole blood, and people with blood types AB+ or AB- are the best for plasma, for anyone who doesn’t know. O- is the universal blood donor type, and AB is the universal plasma donor type. Plasma can be frozen and used weeks afterwards, whereas whole blood has to be used quickly. However, O- is a common type, whereas AB is a rare type, so they sort of offset each other in their usage cases. Donors of both types are needed all the time, as a result. Whole blood can be donated every 56 days; plasma can be donated every 28 days. (Just some info about how this stuff works, for those who don’t know.)
Tigger, it’s exactly for wonderful friends like you that I try to remember to donate as much as I can.