Here’s the story from KSL TV:
Doctors warned a woman to have a caesarian section to save her baby, she refused, the baby died, and now the mother is charged with murder. It’s a case that’s already making national headlines and sparking a heated debate over ethics, fairness and the right to life.
We’ve heard cases before where an expectant mother has been putting her fetus at risk by drinking, or using drugs, or other dangerous behavior. This one has a different twist– it wasn’t what she was doing, it was what she didn’t do.
In custody tonight, charged with murder, is 29-year old Melissa Ann Rowland. She was arrested nearly two months after the stillborn death of her child.
It’s a complicated story involving several local hospitals, doctors and nurses who continually advised that Rowland needed medical attention in order to save her baby’s life. The Salt Lake County District Attorney’s office says Rowland’s lack of action violates the law.
Kent Morgan, District Attorney’s Office: “…the conduct was that she omitted her duty to take care of her child and get affirmative treatment. That’s what makes this case so egregious.”
It started on Christmas Day at LDS hospital.
Rowland — carrying twins — told a nurse that she hadn’t felt them move. The nurse advised her to go to either Jordan Valley or Pioneer Valley Hospital. According to the charging documents, Rowland replied: “she’d rather have both her babies die before she’d go to those hospitals…”
January 2nd, she saw a doctor at LDS Hospital.
Kent Morgan, District Attorney’s Office: “She went and saw a doctor and he indicated that there were very severe medical problems at that time, and that she should immediately have a cesaerian section.”
According to the charges, the doctor told police: “She refused to have the c-section and left.” This despite being warned that lack of treatment could result in the death or severe injury of her babies.
A few blocks away she told a nurse at Salt Lake Regional Hospital that a doctor wanted to cut her “from breast bone to pubic bone”, and that would “ruin her life”. The nurse says Rowland made a comment to the effect that she’d rather “lose one of the babies than be cut like that.”
January 9th, Rowland went to Pioneer Valley Hospital to verify that her babies were still alive. Once again she left and refused treatment after warnings that her babies are in danger.
January 13th she went back to Pioneer Valley and delivered her twins. One was dead; the autopsy shows the boy had died two days earlier.
Kent Morgan, District Attorney’s Office: “There wasn’t a lack of resources. Any one of these hospitals could have taken care of the needs and saved this child.”
Rowland is charged with murder and bail is set at $250,000. We’re told that she has other children and is married. She’ll make her first court appearance in the next day or two.
I listened to “Family Values Talk Radio”, 570 KNRS on the way home. Bob Lonsberry, ultra-conservative, was hosting the show. His opinion? That she deserves the murder charge, and one to fifteen years in prison. The vast majority of callers agreed with his assessment, though several thought she was guilty of stupidity, and not murder.
Is failing to have a medical procedure a crime? Is choosing to give birth vaginally tantamount to murder? Are we now a community that incarcerates nursing mothers because they chose to disregard their doctor’s advice?
Some few callers into Lonsberry’s show attempted to turn this around to the abortion debate: we (society at large) have a (debatable, but) definite point at which we consider a baby to be viable human life. If I recall correctly, that point is somewhere around 27 weeks (correct me if I’m wrong). Could this be considered a late-term abortion on her part? What if she was not insured, and the cost of a C-section was prohibitive? Is lack of funds, and a desire to avoid bankruptcy, a defense for allowing an unborn fetus to die?
I’m not sure about all the rationales going on, but in my mind, one thing is certain: sending a mother to jail for up to fifteen years because one of her unborn twins was born stillborn is just plain stupid. It just serves no purpose. With that in mind, the murder charge itself appears ridiculous on the face of it — yet, one person, through her inaction, allowed another human being, albeit a small one, to die.
It got me thinking about the purpose of incarceration. What’s the reason we send someone to jail, anyway? Is it to “rehabilitate” them, in hopes of preventing them from making similar mistakes? Is it to punish them by depriving them of freedom for a while? Is it to protect society from their evil by preventing them from having the choice available to hurt other people?
Perhaps the time has come for us to make certain “unusual” punishments for unusual crimes. If she’s guilty of negligent homicide, incarcerating her in this circumstance seems to serve absolutely no purpose except to perpetrate the revenge of an outraged community.
What if, for reproductive stupidity, we (society) simply removed reproductive capacity? For men, a simple surgical procedure, and they are sterile (reversibly so). For women, an Intra-Uterine device prevents pregnancy for up to a decade, and is also surgically removable.
But then we’re back into state-mandated surgical procedures, which started this whole rant of mine. If successful, I wonder what kind of barrel of monkeys this prosecution will open up?
Realize I’m just kind of writing aloud at the moment; I haven’t fully decided what to think of this yet. But it’s definitely another “fuzzy gray area” of the law that will almost certainly have major consequences on the state of judicial legislation if allowed to proceed.
As a side note, did the police beat her up on the way in or something? She looks completely miserable in the photo.
Last aside, I promise: I feel for the people of Spain today. At least 192 dead and thousands injured in a terrorist attack on trains around Madrid. I’m appalled at news coverage, however: had this happened in the U.S., a disaster like this, with more wounded than the Oklahoma City bombing, would have massive coverage. Not a single talk radio station was even discussing it today, other than a brief blurb in the on-the-hour news from most stations. I guess it’s not a big deal because it’s in Europe or something. Grr.
Hmmm
My views are as such:
Abortion is murder. If you perform it, the fetus will die. If you don’t, it will continue to develop. Will it make it to birth? Who knows…but it definitely won’t if you abort it.
This woman chose not to have a recommended surgical procedure. The doctors said one if not both of the babies would die if she didn’t have a c-section. However, they couldn’t be sure. She may have been able to carry them and still give birth to both. That the doctors were correct and one baby died is a testament to modern medicine, but my wife is a nurse, and she can tell you even with all the technology, docs are still in the dark about a lot of things.
So, did she commit murder? No way. The doctors are bound by the Hippocratic (sp?) Oath to try and save every patient’s life. However, we have the right to refuse any and all medical treatment. Women have been giving birth without medical help forever, it’s a consequence of the oldest profession. Was she stupid? Absolutely. Is it horrible that the baby died? Even more so. But there’s no way that the government should have the right to make you undergo any medical procedure.
Let me ask this: would we be having this discussion if her reason for not having a c-section were a religious one instead of a paranoid one? If she believed that it wasn’t God’s will to have a baby any other way but natural, would they have brought her up on charges?
I think the doctors and the police were so POed at this woman for being stupid and not getting the proper care for her babies that they felt the need to punish her. I can understand the outrage, because a baby died that might have been saved had she not been an idiot. But she has a right to be an idiot, unfortunately, even at the expense of an unborn child.
Sad to say, but that’s my $.02 Weed
Our Parental Rights
I don’t agree with what this lady chose to do. I also don’t agree with how our system has chosen to punish her. It reminds me of a recent case that started here in Utah, of parents who chose not to follow the usual path to try to cure their son of cancer. They left the state to try to pursue other options and to get away from Utah officials and hospitals. The law went after them.
So here is what is happening. It’s their way or the jail cell. Right now Matt and I don’t have medical insurance, and as you may know, we have two little ones with RSV. For Elijah, who is 30 lbs, it is not such a big deal. For Joshua who is 11 1/2 lbs, it is life threatening. So our doctor was ready to ship him to Primary Children’s Hospital. He knows we aren’t insured. I suggested a home healthcare nurse since we have done this twice before with newborn babies. I asked what treatment would be administered at the hospital. He agreed that treatment could happen at home. Lucky for us we have a doctor who trusts us. Otherwise, we could be sitting in jail for not admitting our newborn into the hospital. There are other options for recovery. Not everyone in this world is incompitant or stupid.
As for this lady’s situation, they could have offered to induce labor immediately instead of a c-section. If that baby was having so much trouble in the first place, it could have died two days after birth anyway. I’m not excusing her idiocy by any means, but there are other options that apparently weren’t considered. And obviously this woman has no idea that a c-section is a two to three inch incision. She also doesn’t seem to have any regard to life in general and I question her ability to raise children in the first place. I wonder if they’ve thought to have DCFS to an investigation on what all is going on in their home.
There’s got to be a happy medium somewhere. —
Christy
SSI
Some other interesting facts came to light today, some via KSL again:
I agree with Christy: we must respect the mother’s rights. At the same time, there is an option for a state to take those rights away in cases of egregious neglect and abuse: the DCFS (Department of Child and Family Services). I guess the question is, can DCFS propose an investigation and prosecute for a mother to lose her children due to neglect before those children are born?
Oy, veh, thinking through the fuzzy ethics on this thing makes my head hurt. And this has made international news — although the Madrid train bombings, of course, are much bigger international news.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
More facts come to light…
More facts on the case came to light via CNN today. She apparently has a history of mental illness, the children were produced with her boyfriend (not her estranged husband), and she signed a document saying she knew she was endangering the life of her unborn babies upon leaving the clinic several weeks before giving birth.
She’s also not a nursing mother at the moment. The surviving twin was adopted by friends of Rowland, as were her previous children.
And her previous children were delivered by C-Section. This is getting weirder and weirder.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Really??? She had mental illness???
I didn’t even have to get past the first three paragraphs of the original post before I started putting together a mental storyline that led to the arrest and lawsuit.
LOOK AT HER PICTURE. She had mental illness? No kidding.
Here’s my thoughts: individual personalities and conflict drive a community to push for a lawsuit of this magnitude. I recognize that this episode developed in Family Values, USA but I’m thinking about what happened. Take away all the CNN-published facts and formal press releases and imagine the personal interactions…
She’s probably borderline poverty. She’s loud and rude and obviously not showing typical signs of the caring mother. She’s mad at the ex-boyfriend or the one-night-stand for getting her impregnated with twins. She’s psycho. She’s confrontational. She visits a bunch of clinics. There’s multiple showdowns with various doctors, nurses, etc. She doesn’t shower much. She’s probably the lead conversation topic at the after-hours doctors hangout spot. Weed’s wife probably deals with these weirdos on a daily basis.
She decides to rant and yap her mouth about getting cut open and killing her babies. After the incident, all the practitioners involved are disgusted with the outcome and decide to take action. It took two months of fact gathering and legal positioning before the arrest takes place.
This is all speculation based on looking at a picture. I haven’t seen one news story in print or on TV. Just the picture. We and the rest of the world are watching this and thinking of the grand legal implications. Is it murder? But I’m thinking that the lawsuit and the real “what happened” was based on this woman’s insanity and reckless behavior and the local community saying, “thos woman was wretched and psycho and she killed her babies and we’re getting her back”. It’s a community outrage against one person rather than a constitutional front.
I could be totally wrong, of course.
— Sammy G
I had a baby..
Salt, a touch of lemon.
Should I go to jail?