The case of Samantha Burton in Florida mostly escaped my attention because it happened during the summer when I was studying for the bar exam. Some recent commentary brought it back into my sights.
I don’t know what to say about the case itself beyond that which you would expect from me. I mean, it’s fucked up, right? And never, ever should have happened. I guess the one thing that I can add to the conversation is that this was not that hospital’s first rodeo at ordering cesarean sections (click for PDF). It just reinforces my sense that when this stuff goes unchecked, it just gets further and further out of control.
I have this morbid fascination with the comments section of webpages, which really bring out the seedy underbelly of our society in its barely-literate glory. One commenter keenly notes:
Just the beginning. Sad how these people believe they have the right to hold you against your will. Especially when they perform late term abortions daily! last I heard about a million a year! Ever notice that the people who are all! about choices and population control are already here
I’m having a hard time putting together what the sentence is even supposed to mean from a purely syntactical perspective, but I think that they’re trying to say that this was all perpetrated by the people who perform late-term abortions. Interesting, considering the court in Pemberton interpreted Roe vs. Wade‘s trimester framework to mean that the mother loses virtually all of her rights at the “compelling” point of viability… in Tallahassee Memorial’s favor. (Before you choke on your heart, recall that Pemberton is an outlier with virtually no precedential value… except where Samantha Burton happens to be… oops.) That court basically says that at viability, not only does the woman not have a right to abortion, she doesn’t have a right to decide whether or not she gets cut open. Whom, exactly, does it sound like Tallahassee Memorial was listening to this time?
And then there was the requisite reference to OBAMACARE! RARRRGH, THE ZOMBIES ARE COMING!!! Look, I can’t say for certain what SenateCare is going to look like, but if they are indeed demanding evidence-based medicine like the teabaggers fear, it won’t look anything like restraining mothers for the sake of their fetuses because that’s definitely not supported by the evidence. As a side question: which is it? Obama wants to kill all teh baybeez, or he wants to forcibly restrain the mothers to save the baybeez?
This particular article struck me as a little glossy, but I was impressed by the fact that 1) it didn’t justify the hospital’s action on the basis of malpractice fears, and 2) it talked about a pregnant woman like she was a normal, rights-bearing person. Well how do you like that? The idea of a pregnant woman as a human being with rights just like everyone else!
One last thing that stuck out:
It used the state’s authority to act as parent when parents won’t get medical care for a child — an irrelevant and improper comparison, since in this case there was no child and the patient was an adult.
Some people got their dander up because they believe as a matter of morality and personal belief that a fetus is a child. That’s cool and all, but when a fetus is legally considered a child, all bets are off. Why? Because the child protective system is a byzantine mess with virtually no protection for parents. I’ve heard these issues be referred to in parents’ rights language before (like “the decision that I made on behalf of my [fetal] child”), and I can’t emphasize enough how wrong of a tree that is to bark up. Why? Because parents actually have only a circumscribed right to medical decisions about their children. Just ask the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists… And anyway, when you think about it that way, it completely overlooks the fact that if there is a child, then the juvenile courts have jurisdiction, which means sealed proceedings that, as far as the record is concerned, never happened. Talk about Kafkaesque. The state has no problem whatsoever taking custody of people’s kids. When they can do that, they have pretty much total control over the pregnant woman.
Like, I was reading a case recently, I forget from where, but the court ordered that the fetus be brought in for further testing. The court notes, sort of cavalierly, (I’m paraphrasing) “this means, of course, that the pregnant woman will have to be detained.” In another one of these cases, it was the state’s attorney that got to live out the delusions of grandeur… when asked by the court how, exactly, they would deliver the fetus-in-custody if the mother didn’t agree to a cesarean, she replied, “drugs will have to be administered.” Yipes!
