State could gain legal control over women’s health

Why do bioethical dilemmas flourish in
Florida? After the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo rivetted the nation in
2004, another unusual and far-reaching case has surfaced in the courts. This
time the issue is a woman’s right over her own body.

Last year a Tallahassee hospital secured a
court order to confine a pregnant woman to her bed to protect her baby.

Samantha Burton, a 29-year-old mother of two,
was 25 weeks pregnant. Her membranes had ruptured, she had contractions and the
foetus was in breech position. Her doctor, Jana Bures-Foresthoefel, thought
that there was a danger of infection or miscarriage. She ordered Ms Burton to
stop smoking and to stay in bed. Ms Burton demurred. She was unhappy with
Tallahassee Memorial Hospital and wanted to go home.

Instead, hospital lawyers showed up and handed
Ms Burton a phone. She found herself defending her plans with Circuit Judge
John Cooper. Judge Cooper supported the hospital and ordered her to stay. Under
Florida law, he declared, a child’s welfare overrides its parent’s. He even barred
her from seeing another doctor.

In the end, the court order did not save the
baby. Ms Burton had an emergency caesarean three days later but the baby was
still-born. Then she was allowed to go home.

This was not the end of the story. Ms Burton
was very angry. In the words of her lawyer, “She wound up basically
nothing more than an incubator for the state. The court order made only the
fetus a patient.” As a matter of principle, she wants the judge’s order
retrospectively rescinded. Otherwise, says her lawyer, “Any time a woman
gets pregnant the state could come in and run her life.”

The
American Civil Liberties Union says that the court order was unconstitutional.
“Ms. Burton’s bodily integrity, privacy, and autonomous decision-making
were given no consideration, let alone respected,” wrote the ACLU in a
brief. “The state failed to consider the fallibility of the single medical
opinion presented in this case or the reality, unfortunately demonstrated in
this case, that forced medical interventions cannot guarantee the preservation
of fetal life.”

The
First District Court of Appeal is still considering the case, which is
beginning to attract nation-wide attention. Writing in the Huffington Post,
freelance bioethicist Jacob M. Appel described it as one of the “most egregious
abuses perpetrated against a patient by her caregiver since the triumph of the
patients’ rights movement in the 1970s.” ~ Tallahassee
Democrat, Jan 18; Huffington Post, Jan 24

Jared Yee
reproductive rights

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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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