To wonder who's life would be prioritised, mother or baby?

[splendidisolation]

Just one of those random train of thought questions that popped up in my head.

Imagine this theoretical scenario, a mother is giving birth and the doctor's have to decide whether to save her life or the newborn on its way out.
Ethically, which would they be forced to choose and why?

Imagine the mother's partner or a family member is present. Obviously horrific, but would they be asked to decide? Who makes that decision?

I suspect she was put on life support at the beginning, hoping to save her, then the family thought "oh we might be able to save the baby", then when they decided to let her go some busybody put their oar in and said "but that would be murder hmm" and it all went to shit. Had everyone else stayed out of it, the hospital would have, presumably, made a medical decision and we would not know anything about it.

Her distraught family brought the case to the high court to have their gorgeous daughter brought off the machine. You really are a piece of work.

The thing is, she was allowed to die iirc, thus proving that the law didn't actually support the assertion that she couldn't be

Not true. Firstly, the hospital refused to turn off the life support machine, leading to the family taking court action. Secondly, the court based its decision on the fact that the child had no prospect of being born alive. That is not the law protecting the rights of women- it is the law riding roughshod all over them.

This is from a newspaper article on the matter:

CHRISTMAS TWO YEARS ago, a story emerged of such compelling sadness, but also of grotesque horrors, that it was hard to look away. A young woman, mother of two small children, was approximately 15 weeks pregnant when she was declared clinically brain dead.
The hospital that she reposed in – and another that she was transferred to – uncertain of the position of the foetus under the Constitution and fearful of prosecution under the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013, did not turn off the life-support machine.
This state of “experimental medicine”, as described by Dr Frances Colreavy – an expert in intensive care treatment at the Mater Hospital – continued for 20 days until the woman’s family brought an application to the High Court to allow them to end the life-support.
During the emergency Divisional Court hearing, P.P. v HSE, the view of the expert witnesses, as well as the HSE, was that there was no reasonable prospect of the baby being born alive if the life-support continued.
The court held that it was in the best interests of the unborn child to authorise the withdrawal of life support, and said that maintenance of life support would deprive the mother of dignity in death and subject her father, her partner and her young children to “unimaginable distress in a futile exercise”.

Maryz - how do you plan to vote in the abortion referendum?

No, I didn't read that 'link' I know how these things work Maryz.

The current law is plainly inadequate.

Or practitioners understanding of the law is plainly inadequate?

See also (all of these things said to me over the years):

• "because of equality law we can't insist that girls at our nursery don't wear a hijab "
• "because that school is an academy, the LEA has no right to know which children attend it"
• "the Human Rights Act means my son can go and get a drink of water whenever they want, otherwise it's torture"
• "You have to give Muslim staff time off at Eid, it's the law"
• "It would be a breach of Data Protection to tell the police about the concerns we have about this parent"

And plenty similar incidents I have heard about where someone knows a little bit about the law - perhaps attended a short training session at some point - and are erring on the side of caution in how to apply it, but in doing so are causing awful problems. I believe in most cases it's genuinely cock-up not conspiracy, but the end result isn't any different because of the motivation

Again, don't mix up the two. The current law is an arse. But it wasn't the current law that stopped SH's treatment

Yes, it was. The 8th amendment is extremely unclear and is based on an impossibility- equal value of the mother's and the fetus's life. That is logically impossible because there will always be situations where one has to take priority over the other. Other countries recognise that the mother's right to bodily autonomy must always come before an unborn person's right to life. Ireland does not. It was because the fetus's right to life is enshrined in the constitution that the medical staff made the decision they did. Therefore the law directly led to the negligent treatment of SH. Had the law stated that the mother's life will always take priority, the situation would be different. The current drafting permits different interpretations.

I just cannot understand any argument otherwise and an Irish person I know who made a very similar argument to yours (also in very neutral, matter of fact terms) just happened to be president of the pro-life society at uni.... Funny that.

Maryz there's a lot of hair splitting going on. The bottom line is that if Savita had been given a termination/c section when she asked for one, she would probably be still alive.

And by "everyone else" of course I didn't mean the family, I meant the do-gooder who decided (probably) to bring it to law instead of letting the hospital deal with it

Which do-gooder? I was under the impression that the family brought the case because the hospital refused to turn off the life support despite their wishes. They had no choice but to go to court and at court, the argument focused on the child's prospects of survival. Note sure the result would have been the same if there was a chance of the child surviving but the mother dying a horrific undignified death.

Maryz you are failing to get your argument over because it does seem like you are defending the Irish current law on abortion by attempting to twist facts to make it look like it was irrelevant to the tragic deaths of many women. You obviously don't mean to do this, but that is how it comes across. So I would think you would be better served using your energy to unequivocally defend abortion rights for Irish women, rather than split hairs.

Papafran, under Irish law as it stands SH could have and should have been treated. The hospital didn't do it

Point me to where it states that mother's life takes priority. The wording of Article 40 is that the state will protect the life of the unborn which is given equal value to the life of the mother. It does not say that the mother takes priority. That is what was needed in the SH case, not a statement saying both lives had equal value.

Yes, Article 40 can be interpreted to mean that the mother can be treated but equally it can be interpreted that an abortion should never be performed where there is a fetal heartbeat. I can't see that the hospital's interpretation was plainly wrong here. The issue is the law. The matter would not have arisen had the constitution not expressly protected the unborn's right to life.

Maryz you are failing to get your argument over because it does seem like you are defending the Irish current law on abortion by attempting to twist facts to make it look like it was irrelevant to the tragic deaths of many women. You obviously don't mean to do this, but that is how it comes across. So I would think you would be better served using your energy to unequivocally defend abortion rights for Irish women, rather than split hairs

Agree 100% with this, TheLuminaries

That case became a legal test case and had to be carried through to the end

It was a legal test in respect of the fact that the woman was on life support and pregnant at the same time, it was politically made so, so as not to disrupt the 8th amendment. Stop distorting the facts. As for the rest of that post, I think you've shown that in discussing such a vital point you have, in fact, resorted to being a victim of horrid pro choice arguments, speaks volumes.

And hurling insults at each other won't help either, will it? You actually agree with each other about the pro-choice position, so the argument is beyond ridiculous. Maryz is clearly not anti-abortion, just pedantic and probably technically right. But if the law hadn't been what it is, then a termination would already have been carried out.

Are you accusing me of being pro-life?

No one is accusing you of anything.

Whatever the technicalities of the case, the likelihood is that if this situation had arisen in the UK, the termination would have been done and the woman might have survived. Even though the care was clearly inadequate and substandard, hospital staff who were more open minded about abortion would probably have gone down that route at a much earlier stage.

Often people misunderstand the exact meaning of laws (as given in some examples above) but the prevailing attitude is determined by the laws.

So I agree both with Maryz (that the Irish law as it stands would have allowed the woman to survive if she'd been looked after properly) and the others who say that an abortion granted sooner may have made a difference in this case. I'm not sure that this single tragic and unusual case means anything with regards to changing the law. Whether you are pro or anti abortion is not really relevant to this particular case.

In brief I agree with Mittens

I'm trying to point out the facts because when the referendum comes around it's going to be a hell of a mess and we need to be absolutely sure of facts, not emotional responses, no matter how awful individual cases may be

Well no, the issue is simple. It is impossible to give equal weight in law to the mother and the fetus. It is simply impossible because there will be situations where an active choice has to be made between the two. The problem therefore is that the law proclaims the lives to be of equal value and explicitly protects the rights of the unborn. The solution is that the constitution only guarantees the rights of those who have been born and are no longer in utero. That is the only way forward as far as I am concerned.