to think it's wrong for a dead woman to be used as an incubator?

[twofingerstoGideon]

One of the most dreadful stories I've read in a long time. Could be triggering.

'Clinically dead' (that's dead, isn't it?) woman kept on life support machine to support 17 week fetus. Her own parents want the life support switched off. I really can't get my head around this at all.

AIBU to think we need to do everything possible to prevent our abortion laws becoming more restrictive and fight against the anti-choice demonstrators who are becoming more and more vociferous and ever-present outside clinics.

Surely even the most staunch anti-choicer can't argue that this is right.

story here

I am Irish and have been back and forth a lot. Perhaps we are a bit older than some posters here so remember things that others wouldn't.
There are many many great things about Ireland but its treatment of women is not one of them. Lets not dance around that issue.

but if she had made it clear that in this situation, she would want to be kept alive for the baby, would you be supporting her choice or would you be saying that her parents should have the right to go against her decision?

that would depend fully on whether it was an informed decision and how far along she was. but that's my opinion.

A person can state something however in following a person's wished circumstances may well arise where the original plan no longer applies. For example if the body doesn't react well or the baby's prospects are very slim or its deformed or severely brain damaged. Surely family need to he the ones to make the decision then because they are the ones dealing with it.

We should always be talking about informed consent.

something like this you can't go by an. off the cuff remark in a discussion you once had. because as it's clear from this thread there's alot of naivety about the process.

organ do action is much simpler than this. A person registers or carries a donor card and there's little discussion required really.

keeping a body alive to grow a baby is far far more complicated. and unless You are absolutely 100% sure your partner knew exactly what the process involves and the stats and the babies chances then yes I think in circumstances stances like this teh family should over rule.

If she was say 32 weeks and they just needed a few days for steroids then that's different again.

Browsers it is very possible that this particular use of the 8th amendment will be over ruled. Not that that makes the amendment right. It isn't.

I think you are very focussed on the Ireland you grew up in. I am 10 years younger so I only saw some of what you experienced, it had started to die out. As has been said Ireland has changed radically thanks to the appalling behaviour of the Catholic church in the main and then just normal change that would have taken place irrespective of the collapse of the Catholic church in Ireland. I also lived in the UK and I found so much commonality and so much difference between the 2 cultures. I lived in Scotland, I imagine if I lived in England it would have been different again. This is why I keep reiterating the cultural differences to on 'the right to life' that are not influenced by the church. For example disability is more visible across Ireland for example probably because abortion is more limited and then as a consequence people have more support from people in similar circumstances. Many Irish people are horrified that babies with ds would automatically be aborted in some other countries as referenced by Dawkins recently. These are realities that influence people's perspective on abortion that extends beyond religion.

Giles, but people aren't arguing that it's wrong because the baby is gong to be deformed/brain damaged. wrt donor cards, what do you think about the proposals for presumed consent or 'opting out' of donation that are going to be introduced in Wales next year?

Just, for me this case is not about abortion. The abortion legislation defends the right of life of the unborn with due regard to the equal life of the mother. I don't see the life of a foetus, viable or otherwise, as equal to that of a mother and I believe that the mother in this case should have the right to die with dignity.

The other issues I mentioned about Ireland's legislation on abortion, contraception, divorce etc. show how women are discriminated against and the fact that largely male legislators make decisions on women's issues really bothers me.

I saw my own mother who is now 80 discriminated against because she was ahead of her time. I have an 18 year old DD who is currently getting lots of offers from universities and I know she will do really well at university but when it comes to balancing work and life including childcare she will be discriminated against. I know things have improved slightly but not enough and they certainly never will so long as society view women's rights as not equal to men's rights.

I'm not sure about it tbh.

In theory it makes sense. as people may not give it a lot of thought and forget to agree to it.

but on the same lines people may not remember to opt out and using the organs would cause huge upset to the family and would be hugely disrespectful to the person who does if they were against it.

There also lies the question of timing.

when do you tell people that they need to opt out for themselves or their children.

duplodon I think it's important not to make assumptions about another country from outside its borders, though it seems to be acceptable to do that about Ireland in a way it isn't about other countries which I find uncomfortable.

OK, to put it into context, if I read about this happening in Pakistan or Iran, I would be equally shocked. There are some standards of decency and humanity which absolutely transcend national frontiers.

But Ireland is part of the EU. Its people have access to education and training and media influences which women in those parts of the world struggle to. It is also a signatory to the ECHR.

So I think rather than professing to be uncomfortable about women's rights as human beings being questioned by someone who has the temerity not to be Irish, you would be better thinking about why one gender should be signalled out to be treated in this way, irrespective of nationality.

Exactly Chandler! Women are viewed as appendages in a way that men are not and their human rights are assigned accordingly. In a truly equal society that brain dead mother would be allowed to die with dignity because she was a human being in her own right.

"So I think rather than professing to be uncomfortable about women's rights as human beings being questioned by someone who has the temerity not to be Irish, you would be better thinking about why one gender should be signalled out to be treated in this way, irrespective of nationality"

Absolutely, but as a 42 year old Irish woman who still lives here, I really do not think this is "the will of the Irish people" or "how the Irish treat women". As I said above, nobody under the age of 50 actually voted for (or had an opportunity to vote against) the 8th. There's a lot of political cowardice around the issue, particularly a reluctance to anger the vocal minority (and they are a minority) who are ultra-conservative on social issues. But there are also a lot of ordinary Irish people who are really really angry about this, particularly women.

(I also, fwiw, had no issues whatsoever getting contraception, etc, as a young woman - possibly it was different in rural Ireland, particularly if you had a conservative GP or pharmacist, but not so much in Dublin. Though was, obviously, pissed off about the 8th amendment then and am still pissed off about it now. Last march I was on I felt like getting a t-shirt saying "I have been protesting about this for twenty years, can't believe I'm STILL dealing with this shit"....)

Regardless of the legal and ethical debate surrounding this terribly sad case, surely it's just not going to be medically possible to have a healthy baby from this anyway. How long would it take for severe pressure ulcers to develop, become infected and cause a systemic infection which kills the foetus? This is only one possibility of thousands which could well end in the death of the foetus.

Yes, as people were saying above I think the idea that this is going to involve a "sleeping beauty" delivering a perfectly healthy baby is highly unrealistic.

Well, there have been healthy babies, twins even, that have been born out of these situations.

In the case of organ donation, both Men and Women are kept alive until their organs can be taken.

So if you and your DH were in an accident with one of your children, your DH would be kept alive to donate an organ to your child.

You, however are saying that rather than be kept alive to save the life of your unborn child, that option shouldn't be there.

As for non life threatening disability, we are thankfully (as a Mum of a child with LDs) treated equally.

Women, obviously, are the only ones who could be pregnant, so this is unique to one gender, but I don't think the whole equality argument should be bought into this.

As of "dying with dignity", I think if my unborn child could be saved and I wasn't given this option (or rather my child wasn't), then the dignity of my death, has been removed.

Have there been many/any cases of healthy babies born when maternal death occurred so early in the pregnancy, though? There's a big difference between a foetus that's at/almost at viability and one early in the second trimester.

Birdsgottafly if this weren't such a serious subject, I would think the above was a joke post. Seriously? You seriously think like that and were born in the 20th Century in Europe? You think keeping people alive for organ donation for a few days is equivalent to keeping a woman alive for many months just in case she gives birth to a live child? And the possibility of birth is an excuse for ill treatment of women?

The other problem with all of this surely is that there is almost no political debate on this in Ireland. Are your politicians there even bothering to debate this in the same degree as here on mumnset? Have the doctors involved fully considered all medical evidence and is it accessible to members of the public or perhaps even the media? Or has the debate been effectively shut down?

As for non life threatening disability, we are thankfully (as a Mum of a child with LDs) treated equally

precisely as a mum of a child.

A mum who is there to fight for opportunities and any help your child needs.

Sure same can be said for disabled or brain damaged kids in care

Disabled children in care have the poorest prospects in even the wealthiest countries.

"there is almost no political debate on this in Ireland."

Of course there is political debate on this in Ireland, where on earth did you get the idea there wasn't? This case and previous awfulnesses as a result of the 8th have been all over the papers, some politicians have attempted to change the law, it's been the subject of TV discussions, people have been out on the streets on a fairly regular basis, it's An Issue.

There's political reluctance by the major parties to actually bite the bullet and have a referendum on the 8th but that doesn't mean nobody is talking about it. Far from it.

The natural extension to Pro-Life.

If she had expressed a wish for this to happen I'd be ok with it, but to do this to her is shocking.

How long can they keep her going? Maybe she could host a few more children after this one? After all she's just lying there anyway and doesn't have any rights.

The only part of this that's not depressing is that I suspect most people who live there will not agree with it. Things are changing and when the laws catch up this will be classed as barbaric and abusive.

'I think rather than professing to be uncomfortable about women's rights as human beings being questioned by someone who has the temerity not to be Irish...'

Did you mean to be so rude?

If you read my contributions to this thread, I have made no bones about my concern for the larger social and political ramifications arising from this and the eighth, for example, the way it has been used to deny consent to women in labour for ARM.

However, I'm not about to pretend that the fact that this has supported patriarchal barbarity means Ireland is this priest ridden ultra conservative society that blithely accepts this as a status quo with no political debate or will to change to the extent that no woman should visit in protest, with England a shining light of equality in all imaginable regards. I wouldn't characterise the UK's treatment or women on the Rotherham or Ched Evans scandals, say. I don't support the eighth and I didn't as far back as I can remember, I was 14 at the same time as the X case broke, I am terribly grateful I had my babies in the UK with midwife led care away from all this. My point was simply that there is extreme reductionism of Irish society being professed as absolute truth and I am not comfortable with that. How you extrapolated from that to your hyperbolic statement above is beyond me.

Well I am firmly pro-choice but in these circumstances I would ask that everything possible be done to give a chance of life so long as I felt there was a positive future available for my child. If parents and siblings unable or unwilling to give good care then I would let nature take its course.

The woman's father is challenging the decision to keep his daughter alive and it will be heard in the High Court on Tuesday. Commentators reckon it will go to the Supreme Court. It will be very interesting to hear the outcome. That poor family.

"My point was simply that there is extreme reductionism of Irish society being professed as absolute truth and I am not comfortable with that."

Me neither.

Puffins, the article you have linked to doesn't seem to mention the woman's partner. Have you perhaps confused it with references to the woman's father?

I am very very pro organ donation and am on the register myself, but I think this is wrong and agree it is poles apart.

I'm not seeing it as stopping life support being a decision to actively kill the foetus. I am seeing it that every attempt they are making to keep the woman's body going is consciously choosing to give life to this foetus. If it was already or very close to being viable that would be a different case; it is not.

Just as you wouldn't create a test tube baby and implant it into a dead woman's womb, I think this is wrong; I believe that consciously extending "life" of this woman's body is the same thing. We (as in humans, scientists, doctors, whatever) simply don't know enough about what we are doing. Organ donation is different - we have been doing it for a long time and know that it doesn't have any unwanted effects (like you always get in films e.g. the donor's personality somehow imprinting on the recipient). I don't know by the way if organ donation was experimental at first, but in any case, it's naive at best - it's basically assuming that all a baby needs to develop is a placenta and nutrients. But we're discovering new things about babies all the time, what they are aware of in the womb. It wasn't just the things about the baby being unable to hear normal sounds of life (we now know that language development begins in the womb), a heartbeat (presence of a mother's heartbeat after birth in kangaroo care stabilises an infant's heartbeat and breathing more effectively than any incubator), feel the normal movement of the mother walking around (there are theories around sensory development which hinge on movement such as this, again, we just don't know how important this is yet), but those were things that made me think - what else are we missing, what else don't we know? Is she kept warm? If not, what implications would that have, considering that the body is "expected" to be warm?

And what we do know - from other cases - the Texas case, where the baby did not develop properly. We don't know what we are doing. That is reckless in the extreme. It's not "doing whatever they can to have a chance of saving the baby", it's grotesque. This is nothing but a human experiment. And to the person who said "Of course you wouldn't tell the child!" - What, and this child (if it miraculously did survive to be a healthy person) isn't ever going to turn into an adult and find out?!

I think future generations will look back at what doctors have done in these cases and be absolutely horrified. I think there will be massive implications, probably which we won't realise for a long time because I think it's likely that the baby will die or be born very disabled.

When we develop the means to gestate babies outside of a woman's womb then this will be possible, for now, we should leave well alone. We can already "gestate" 20 week + foetuses fairly successfully - that ought to be the cut off point here too. And I might add that although incubator care is pretty well researched and well known now, we still wouldn't attempt to keep a 34 week pregnant brain dead woman alive, a c-section would be performed and the baby would be cared for by incubator. Because we know what we're doing with incubators.

And even if organ donation was experimental to begin with, we have moved on now. It's 2014. We should not be doing radical experiments with real people's lives in the balance.

We need to accept that we can't fix everything at this point in time. Perhaps it's better that we can't.