Nebraska "Forced to Watch Baby Die" story looks fishy

Woman Forced To Watch Her Baby Die Because Nebraska Anti-Abortion Law Prohibited Doctor From Acting UPDATE: You can read what a specialist has to say about this story here. The first clue that this is a political piece rather than a news report is the misleading headline, which tries to make it sound like the baby could have been saved if only those nasty anti-abortion people hadn't tied the good doctor's hands. The woman's water broke at 23 weeks. The story presents it as a total no-hope scenario. The baby would be unable to develop the capacity to breathe after birth. But is that really the case when the water breaks early? This woman tells the story of how her water broke at 22 weeks. She did have the outcome the Nebraska story anticipates -- though she managed to hang on to the baby for five more weeks, the lack of amniotic fluid kept the baby's lungs from properly maturing, so the baby died in the NICU. This woman was still in the hospital when she told her story, so we don't have her baby's outcome -- but another woman in the hospital with her had her water break at 19 weeks, and she managed to hang on to 36 weeks. Her baby needed a little extra help but was able to go home at 5 days old. One of the women who responded to the post had her water break at 23 weeks; she held on to just over 25 weeks, and was able to take her baby home -- a baby 11 months old and evidently fine as of the time the mother posted. Another woman who responded said that when her water broke prematurely the amniotic membrane healed up and she went to term. A respondent at a Yahoo! Answers page provided a link to this page, a peer-led support resource for women who have suffered PROM -- Premature Rupture of Membranes. The PROM page notes:

Between countries, hospitals, and doctors treatment or management of PROM are handled differently. Bedrest? Antibiotics? Induction? We are each given different information about our chances for a successful outcome.

They then launch into information for women who have just gotten the PROM diagnosis:

Our first message to you and your family is the most important: Don't give up hope. Your health care team may know little about PROM and may tell you that your baby's chance for survival is so grim that it isn’t worth trying to save him or her. Although we don't know the specifics of your situation, there are many stories on this website of babies who have survived despite PROM. Know that miracles happen.

And now, most salient to our story, these women who have been there and done that list a plethora of options available to women who have suffered PROM. The choices are not as the story implied, kill the baby in-utero or just watch it die. This might be a good time to point out exactly what it involves to deliberately kill a 23-week baby in the womb. The standard approach is to inject drugs directly into the baby's heart to kill her. This method is unacceptable for euthanizing animals. So what the Nebraska law was preventing was one option -- killing the baby in a way that the Humane Society of the United States forbids its shelters from using to kill animals. So let's look again at options for management of PROM that were available, but which either this woman or her doctor rejected in favor of wanting to harpoon the baby in the heart with a gigantic syringe full of poison: Surviving the Unthinkable: "Many PROM list members were initially told that they "should" terminate their pregnancies simply because their health care practitioners believed that their babies' chances of survival were low, and not because the women themselves were showing signs of infection or were in active labor. After examining their options, many of these women ultimately rejected the suggestion that they terminate, and some went on to have healthy babies." And even if this woman had health problems that made continuing the pregnancy too risky, perinatal hospice was another option which could have been made available. So, long story short: This woman's doctor was not forbidden by law to offer this woman help. There were a plethora of options available, many of which could have given her baby a chance of survival. I can't say why the doctor didn't offer these options -- or if he did but the mother chose to ignore them because she wanted the harpoon-the-baby-in-the-heart-with-poison option and was pissed off that she didn't get it. But the point remains that the only option forbidden in this case is one that would have been forbidden by the Humane Society of the United States in dealing with a sick dog. Do we, as a society, have an obligation to help parents to do something to their baby that it's cruel to do to a puppy? Or is it best to remind doctors and women that there are plenty of options available that are humane, compassionate, and decent? Let's go back to the misleading headline. Who is it that forced this mother to watch her baby to die? Not the prolifers, who left a wide variety of options open, including having a perinatal hospice volunteer cuddle the baby during her fifteen minutes of postnatal life, during which she also could have been sedated to make sure she was comfortable. It was somebody with a pro-abortion political agenda that "forced" this woman to watch her baby die. Somebody who rejected the wide variety of compassionate options available to this woman and others like her.