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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsExpert: Abortion would have improved chances of woman who died from ruptured uterus
A miscarrying woman who died in an Irish hospital should have had her blood poisoning detected much sooner and been offered an abortion to improve her odds of survival, an experts' report concluded Thursday in a case that is forcing Ireland to modernize its abortion laws.
The 108-page report into the October death of Savita Halappanavar documented what the lead investigator described as "a cascade of mistakes" overshadowed by officials' refusal to remove the fetus until its heart stopped beating.
That took four days. By then, the report found, the woman's ill-diagnosed sepsis from a ruptured uterus already had reached lethal levels.
"If it was my case, I would have terminated the pregnancy," Dr. Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, a London professor of obstetrics and gynecology who led the seven-month probe, said. The five investigators found that a chain of doctors and nurses all failed to take proactive steps to identify and halt the spread of infection throughout her body.
http://news.yahoo.com/expert-dying-woman-got-irish-abortion-184528492.html
Not their fault, the law there says they have to pretty much place a dying fetus over a living woman. The anti-choicers talk about a culture of life, but what they create wherever abortion bans are passed is a culture of fear.
enlightenment
(8,830 posts)But they consistently missed evidence for days pointing to an existing case of sepsis, or blood poisoning, as the cause. Blood test results were left uninspected and successive shifts failed to read earlier medical notes as vital signs worsened.
The report found that doctors placed too much emphasis on measuring the fetus' heartbeat and too little on investigating why Halappanavar's white blood-cell count was jumping, her blood pressure was falling and her heart rate and temperature were rising. All were signs of growing internal infection linked to a rupture in her uterus that a night-shift doctor identified in notes, but a day-shift doctor failed to read.
No, they couldn't legal abort - but they could have done their damned jobs. They "missed" signs of infection that would have been obvious to the greenest intern. Treating the infection wouldn't have killed the fetus, but it might have saved the mother.
JaneyVee
(19,877 posts)Another nail in the coffin of conservative ideology.