Samantha Burton wanted to leave the hospital. Her doctor strongly disagreed, enough to go to court to keep her there.Burton, who says she hopes "nobody else has to go through what I went through" is appealing the judge's order that kept her in the hospital against her will and is not asking for a financial settlement; she "hopes to keep her case from setting a precedent for legal control over women with problem pregnancies" as she "worries it could prevent women from seeking prenatal care" if the decision is allowed to stand.
She smoked cigarettes during the first six months of her pregnancy and was admitted on a false alarm of premature labor. Her doctor argued she was risking a miscarriage if she didn't quit smoking immediately and stay on bed rest in the hospital, and a judge agreed.
Three days after the judge ordered her not to leave the hospital, Burton delivered a stillborn fetus by cesarian-section.
And six months after the pregnancy ended, the dispute over the legal move to keep her in the hospital continues, raising questions about where a mother's right to decide her own medical treatment ends and where the priority of protecting a fetus begins.
...[Burton] voluntarily went to the hospital after experiencing symptoms she'd been told to look out for, he said.
But she didn't like the care she received at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. She said her doctor, Jana Bures-Foresthoefel, was brusk and overbearing. Her lawyer [David Abrams] said bed rest for difficult pregnancies is a controversial issue because it can cause some complications like blood clots. Abrams said smoking by itself doesn't cause miscarriages.
The mother said she wanted the option to seek care at another hospital or to go home so she could care for her two daughters.
"I was desperately hoping to receive the care I needed to save my baby," Burton wrote in her statement. "However, after a few days there, I did not feel I was receiving the care I needed, and instead of being allowed to leave or go to another hospital, I found myself being ordered by a judge to stay at Tallahassee Memorial and submit to all medical care from its hospital staff, whether I agreed or not."
ACLU lawyer Diana Kasdan said if the ruling stands it would be a "horrible precedent" that "could lead to the state virtually taking over the lives of pregnant women, including telling them what they should or should not eat and drink and what medications they must take."
The judge who made the ruling asserts that the fetus' best interests (!) overrode Burton's privacy rights (and attached right to "choose or refuse medical treatment"), about which Burton's lawyer Abrams notes: "If you apply the best interest of the child standard, the woman becomes nothing more than a fetal incubator owned by the state of Florida."
I totally missed Blog for Choice Day last week, but here's what I said last year, which I would have reiterated:
I support choice for a very simple reason: I want it. I want choice—for myself, and for other women. And I trust women to make the best choices for themselves. That's about the long and the short of it.I trust women. This ruling is the total fucking opposite of trusting women.
All the rest—the hand-wringing, the shaming, the religion, the science, the assertions of certitude about when life begins—is just so much noise, is just so many different ways of qualifying why, exactly, women aren't fit to make decisions for themselves about their reproduction.
I trust women, and the only question I have for someone who rejects choice is: Why don't you?
[H/T to Shaker Azzy.]
