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Pregnant woman ordered by court to be confined in the hospital

Jill

Score another one for the folks who think pregnancy makes a woman less deserving of basic rights and liberties:

Imagine this — you’re the busy mother of two small kids with another one on the way. This pregnancy has been fraught with complications. During a medical exam, your doctor orders bed rest for the remainder of your pregnancy. You explain that you can’t possibly stay in bed for four months with two small children (!). The doctor insists. You say you want to get a second opinion. The doctor refuses and goes to court and gets a court order mandating your confinement in the hospital for the remainder of your pregnancy.

When the woman, Samantha Burton, asked to be transferred to a different hospital so that she could get a second opinion, she was told no, because it wasn’t in the best interests of the fetus. After three days of confinement against her will, Ms. Burton miscarried.

29 thoughts on Pregnant woman ordered by court to be confined in the hospital

  1. Gee, you think the stress of being sentenced to four month’s imprisonment for no crime might have something to do with that miscarriage?

  3. Sounds like a ‘reimagining’ of “Misery”

    I’m guessing that Doctor ain’t gonna lose his job… ugh.

  5. I am going to do some digging around to substantiate this, but I thought there was good evidence that bed rest has its own serious risks: the physical costs it imposes on the mother, such as muscle atrophy, precipitous decline in fitness, longer recovery from delivery, etc., and psychological costs to be being stuck in bed, such as boredom, frustration, feelings of helplessness, and clinical depression.

    Nice of them to do that entire cost/benefit analysis against her will.

  6. I think it’s pretty likely that many of the people who support this course of action would be the same ones to squawk about “parental rights” when the government tries to do things that are in the best interests of born children, even if these “parental rights” involve things that aren’t in the best interests of children (eg abstinence-only).

  7. Bed rest increases the risk of blood clots in the legs. That said, depending on the diagnosis, this may have been the smaller risk as compared to forced bedrest.

    Notwithstanding the emotional damages of false imprisonment, attempted battery, etc.–and what ever happened to the other two kids? Were they taken away by CPS and put into a “loving” foster family???

  8. Absolutely horrifying. Cant something be done or a law passed to stop things like this? There should be something to protect pregnant women.

  9. Can she sue for malpractice? Forcing someone into treatment without informed consent sounds to me like it should be a pretty obvious no-go. And denying her a second opinion is also, IMHO, tantamount to a)malpractice and b) conspiracy to cover up malpractice (and c) denying someone access to information about their condition, which may be necessary to make the best choice.

    Then there’s the problem of the judge who saw fit to issue this court order . . .

    Also, who, precisely, was supposed to pay for all this? Four months in a hospital is Not Cheap—anybody want to guess the odds that the doctor convinced the hospital to eat the costs of it? Somehow I’d imagine her insurance would be the one getting billed for it, and if they balked, the hospital would start going after her for it.

    And, yeah, who was going to care for her children, then, or pay her salary when she misses work?

    Asshole, assholes and more assholes—if somebody tried this on me, they’d be buying me a different Bugatti Veyron for every day of the week.

  10. Jesus fucking Christ. I hope she sues him and wins a judgment big enough to scare the daylights out of anyone else tempted to pull this sort of bullshit.

  11. The ACLU has already filed a friend of the court petition regarding this issue and Samantha Burton. I do not know (and cannot find a reference) to whether she is going to follow this with civil action against the doctor and hospital involved, or whether she is going to ask for criminal charges to be pursued. If I were her, I would, but I don’t see a reference to either of these actions anywhere.

  12. For the record, I was on bed rest for three months, and every competant doctor I saw said the same thing:

    There is no conclusive evidence that bed rest prevents miscarriage or preterm delivery.

    So it’s not just that they imprisoned this woman without benefit of trial. It’s not just that they put the rights of a nonviable fetus miles ahead of hers. It’s that they did all this to force her to undergo treatment that doesn’t even fucking work. It’s the obstetrical version of a rubbing a damned rabbit’s foot.

  13. Let me guess–this is not a middle class white woman. I’m just flabbergasted by how this could happen and why on earth a doctor wouldn’t let her get a second opinion, and the only thing that’s coming to me is that she is: (a) poor, (b) a woman of color, or (c) both.

  14. No, Raging Red, this is precisely the sort of crime one does against middle class white women.

    Snowflakes, it’s all about the snowflakes.

  15. “Let me guess–this is not a middle class white woman.”

    She may be. Remember, white babies are Very, Very Important, and if a white woman is being so remiss as to not have enough of them or to display insufficient commitment to making more of them, then it’s totes okay to bring the law to bear in order to make her perform according to specification. It’s basically a “seize the means of production” idea, the flip side of the “destroy the means of production” tactic that gets deployed against woc. And, of course, doctors can get on just as much of a power trip about rescuing a sainted fetus from its bad/negligent/misguided mother as they can about making women with intersecting vulnerabilities do as they say.

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  17. This is absolutely ridiculous. As a currently pregnant woman I can’t even imagine being put on that much bed rest. I def. wouldn’t be able to pay my regular bills after a couple of weeks, not to mention the hospital bills. I wonder what the tests on the fetal tissue will reveal (ie if there was some sort of genetic reason or was the fetus nonviable).

  18. I did a little research and couldn’t determine whether Burton is white or of color, single or married, or any other relevant demographic info.

    But the risks of bedrest are well documented, as is the lack of evidence for it halting miscarriage. (I wrote about this at more length at my place – hope no one minds some shameless self-promotion on a Wednesday!)

    Bedrest also has harsh social costs. For a woman – like Burton – who’s already a mother, it creates an almost irresolvable conflict, unless she has a friend or family member who can basically move in and parent her existing children.

    Oh, and Samantha Burton didn’t miscarry after three days (though media reports seem to be saying this). She was subjected to a c-section and delivered an already-dead fetus. The ACLU amicus brief doesn’t say how long the fetus appeared to be dead, but the brief’s phrasing raises troubling questions about whether the doctors were even monitoring fetal heart tones.

  19. Wow. This level of medical arrogance is one of the highest I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard lots.

  20. The other thing this makes me think of: I’ve heard the argument by the forced pregnancy crowd that pregnancy is “only 9 months” and not that hard, and you can “just give up the baby for adoption.” Even if we can put aside the issues involved in giving birth to a baby and not parenting that baby, this is one more way that pregnancy is not the cake walk some imagine it to be. Apparently in the eyes of some it means you give up your right to medical consent and freedom from confinement.

  21. With all due respect, evil_fizz, isn’t it obvious that neither the judge nor the doctor gives a rat’s rootie-patootie about Ms. Burton? I wholeheartedly agree with preying mantis. I hope she sues the hospital for every dime it owns. I also support revoking the doctor’s medical license and impeaching the judge. There is no possible excuse for this to have happened in our country.

  22. The physician acted to generate a defensible chart; the consequence of a litigious society. The comments here indicate another litigious group, activist feminists. The doc was smart, documenting “we did everything possible to prevent a miscarriage.” There may be no medical merit to hospitalization, but it will play well for the juries.

  23. While the woman should be free to seek a second opinion and not held prisoner by the hospital, you need to keep in mind that most insurance companies WILL NOT PAY for a hospital transfer simply because the patient wants a second opinion.

    Therefore even if she was able to transfer out, she’d be eating the cost of the entire hospitalization plus transport, which would run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  24. Losing a baby at 25 weeks is not a miscarriage. I have had a miscarriage. My niece was born at 26 weeks and she is a beautiful baby girl…be careful with your wording. Regardless, this whole situation is bad.

  25. “Therefore even if she was able to transfer out, she’d be eating the cost of the entire hospitalization plus transport, which would run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

    Easily covered after her wrongful imprisonment lawsuit.

    Time for a doctor to lose his license and judge to be removed from the bench.

    I bet neither will happen.

    But hopefully she’ll emerge with buckets of money with which to move to better community in another state.

  26. The physician acted to generate a defensible chart; the consequence of a litigious society. The comments here indicate another litigious group, activist feminists. The doc was smart, documenting “we did everything possible to prevent a miscarriage.” There may be no medical merit to hospitalization, but it will play well for the juries.

    *Snort* I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on the troll-meter, but this is ridiculous. A defensible chart is “patient signed out against medical advice”, along with full documentation of the counseling the physician did with the patient, not trying to involuntarily commit the patient to a hospital, forcibly confine her to bed, and deny a second opinion.

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  29. “Losing a baby at 25 weeks is not a miscarriage.”

    If the doctor was trying to put her on bedrest for four months, she was in, at most, her fifth month of pregnancy. As in, 20 weeks. At which point, a lost pregnancy is a miscarriage.

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