According to a few sources (but only a few, so I’m not sure how reliable they are), El Salvador’s Health Minister approved a C-section for “Beatriz” yesterday, a day after the Supreme Court ruled that she could not have a life-saving abortion.
The Health Department hasn’t given a day or time for when Beatriz will deliver the baby by Cesarean section, said Morena Herrera, a member of the Feminist Collective for Local Development, an organization that has been supporting Beatriz.
“She is going through all the medical exams to be ready for surgery,” Herrera said.
I hope it’s not too late.
H/t PatrickG.
I sincerely hope she does all right…HOWEVER, fuck the doctrine of double effect, and all that shit. There is no earthly justification for putting this woman through all the risks of surgery and having her abdominal wall & uterus cut into, etc., etc., for a baby that simply cannot live, and can’t experience life even in the unlikely event that it has enough brain stem to hold on for a few days. D&E would be safer and more medically indicated.
@1 beat me to it. The moral idiocy, that it’s OK to do things one (which happens to be the worse) way, but not the other (easier) way, even though *all* the relevant outcomes are the same, is mind-boggling. We’re not debating the relative ethics of pushing the fat man in front of the trolley here vs. throwing the track switch, here. This isn’t hard.
But let’s be real here.
The only reason that Beatriz is even at 26 weeks in her pregnancy is because she was legally prevented from ending it earlier. Had she been able to have a real abortion at the time it was discovered she needed one, her health would not be in the state it is now.
Beatriz’s health is still very delicate, and while this is a promising development, I’m of the opinion that a D&E procedure poses much less additional risk to her health than a C-section. The latter exposes her to a greater chance of infection, which could be deadly because of her Lupus and compromised immune system.
They are “delivering” the fetus early knowing full well that it will not survive. I highly doubt that Beatriz would be allowed even this imperfect option if the fetus were NOT anencephalic, though her life and health would have been equally at risk with a viable fetus.
This is not a “win-win” situation, where Beatriz has a chance at survival and El Salvador gets to pretend that this is not an abortion. What about the next Beatriz? And the next? And the next? And the next? And the next? And the next? And the next?
Because there will never, ever be a time when this will never, ever become an issue.
What worries me is that people will chalk this up to a “job well done” regardless of whether or not Beatriz survives the procedure, and attempt to shut down this crucial conversation.
Yeah, I’m sort of cringing to see the “we won!” campaigns. Maybe they won’t happen, but…
Winning would have been Beatriz getting access to a medical procedure she and her doctors deemed necessary… before 26 weeks.