Posted on 10/11/2014 1:30:53 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Only little by little did Gracie Attard learn the story of her twin Rosie, the sister who’d died shortly after their birth. There was no sudden revelation, just a drip-feed of information; a slow-dawning realisation.
‘Mum and Dad used to take me to the cemetery where Rosie is buried and tell me: “She’s your sister, and you were twins.” Actually, they said we were joined together,’ she says. ‘Later I heard them use the word “conjoined”. I didn’t know what it meant, and when I was about seven I got my first dictionary and looked it up.
‘Then I felt confused, but I said to Mum: “I know what it is now,” although I still didn’t really understand.
‘A year or so later, I looked on the internet and found out that our story was a big one that went round the world. I didn’t think about that. I just wanted to know exactly what happened.
‘I read the stories and it felt as if I was reading a book about someone else. I didn’t exactly feel detached, but I wasn’t really involved either. It all happened so long ago, when I was a tiny baby.’
Gracie is 14 now, and a livewire. Shrewd, funny and voluble, she loves to cycle and swim. She is determined to become a doctor and has strongly held opinions on most things.
But for a few intensely fraught weeks after her birth in a Manchester hospital on August 8, 2000, her very existence was the subject of an ethical debate that gripped the world.
Gracie was born a Siamese twin, joined to her sister Rosie, end to end, at the abdomen and spine. They shared an aorta, a bladder and circulatory systems. Their tiny legs were splayed at right angles from their shared trunk.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
What a sweet story. Lovely girl. God bless her.
What a terrible and happy story!
Personally, I don’t find this a huge moral dilemma. The doctors were not trying to kill Rosie, they were trying to save both babies. Rosie was just in such bad shape she couldn’t survive apart from her sister.
It’s better to lose one life than two.
She was the precocious one all right. Seven years old when she used a computer to google up her own history, that, long before her parents were ready to discuss the entire event.
This pre-exposure to the truth will happen more often in this day and age.
In ethical terms, the death if Rosie was a completely foreseen, but completely unintended, double effect. If they could have saved both, I am certain they would have done so. An in fact they kept trying to do so, within the limits of the possible.
Several decades ago my wife and I had our first daughter at home. As part of the preparation, we took 80 hours of emergency childbirth training.
One of the instructors had been a midwife waaayy back in the boonies of South America for several years about 30 years earlier. She showed us her medical bag and tools.
One of the tools was very oddly shaped. When I asked about it, she explained that it was used to decapitate one baby of a set of twins when necessary.
I was of course appalled. She explained that twins are not uncommonly oriented so that one is breech and the other normally oriented. Their heads can interlock so that neither can be born.
As a midwife, she wasn’t allowed to do a C-section. There was no way to get a doctor to do one where she was.
If she did nothing, both babies and the mother would all die, after immense suffering.
So the answer was to cut the head off one baby so the mother and the other child could be saved.
Sometimes terrible things are necessary.
While she had been trained in how to use this equipment, she was eternally grateful that she hadn’t had to actually do it.
The moral equation is really very simple. It’s better to lose one life than three. We are so coddled we have forgotten that decisions of this type have been common throughout human history. We just refuse to accept it.
It occurred to me when I read your comment. God the Father made that exact decision. One life for each of us.
This is not like an abortion or a killing. One child had to die, or else they would both have died.
What I think might be difficult to live with is that the doctors had to make a choice, which of the twins to kill. It could have been the other way around. Best solution to that is to be grateful for the sister who gave her life for her, and to pray for her.
God the Father didn’t kill Jesus.
There are three patients at risk here: two babies and a mother. The midwife's ethical role is to try to save as many as possible, even if the death of one was probable; and in any case, to CARE for all of them, even the dying.
She would be justified under the circumstances to attempt a C-section (whether she was "allowed" to do so or "licensed" to do so or not.) A midwife ---- especially an experienced one with modern training --- would have a bette practical grasp of how to do the surgery than eventhe ebst OB/GYN of 100 years ago. A midwife would have a good idea of how to do the incision, how to control pain and bleeding, how to keep things sterile and antiseptic. If she tried it and she lost one of the babies, it would not be because of beheading the baby, it would be a totally unintended outcome of a legitimate procedure.
The first successful modern C-sections were done in around the 1880's by doctors who were far less trained and equipped to do them correctly, than a midwife would be today.
I agree that an attempted C-section would be the morally preferable alternative.
However, she was not trained to do one, and was legally prohibited from doing so, and her acceptance of this prohibition was a prerequisite of her being accepted into the position.
IOW, she knew going in that this was a possibility. If she couldn’t accept that, then she shouldn’t take the job. She shouldn’t agree to X and then decide to do Y when faced with the actual decision.
In the case I described, I don’t think it is accurate to say that the intent is to kill. The intent is to save life. In this case, the only way to save two of three lives is to sacrifice one life.
As I said, lots of us have gotten to a point where we refuse to accept that sometimes such decisions must be made.
For example, a few years back there was great outcry among conservatives about the “Lifeboat Game,” in which the boat would only hold 12, but 20 people wanted on board. The idea was that it was morally unacceptable to make the decision to cause some to die so that other can live.
Yet the absolute logic of the LG simply cannot be wished away. The choice is not between saving 20 and saving 12. It’s between saving 12, in the process losing 8, or losing 20. As I said before, to my mind that’s not a difficult moral decision.
Anymore than is losing one child in the process of saving another and the mother.
Your analogy of cutting off the mother’s head is just, pardon the expression, stupid. There would be no reason to do so except murderous intent.
BTW, I agree it would be preferable to give midwives in this situation some training in how to do an emergency C-section.
You "intentionally" do something if you intend it as a means or as an end. If you intentionally decapitate a child as a means to an end, it is a purposeful, targeted kill.
To illustrate: it would be different if the midwife tried a foreceps delivery with a huge episiotomy which was pretty rough, and the the kid who had the foreceps applied to his head ended up dead of a head trauma. In this case, the damage was foreseeable as possible or even probable, but not intended: the intent was not to deliver one baby by decapitating the other. There was a legitimate attempt to save both, as well as of course the mother.
A midwife or any other health worker is in an awful situation there. Granted. OB/GYNS get ruined by lawsuits for that sort of thing: because everybody thinks they have a "right" to have a well-baby-well-mother outcome even when the situation was fraught with deadly peril and no answer would have been perfect. One can't give a flip answer.
But a provider should be willing to jeopardize their license in extremis in order to save a life. What is more important, a license or a life? Do you really refuse to do an emergency lifesaving procedure because you're not presently licensed to do it?
Let us say a brief prayer concerning whopping big medical liability lawsuits. The ruination of many a good OB/GYN and the bane of good obstetrics in America.
the intent is not abortion or murder. that makes a huge difference, if there was any other way, they’d do that first.
c-section - i’d rather try first than doing the decapitation. the real issue there is not slicing into the babies.
I didn’t read it carefully enough the first time. If a C-Section could have saved them both, then probably that should have been tried. But if they did the best they could, then saving one is better than letting both of them die.
The headline makes it sound like they sacrificed one for the other, which is sick
The C-section discussion further down the thread is with reference to another situation, where a midwife might be considering a craniotomy (crushing or lopping off a baby's head) when managing a badly-positioned twin delivery.
Deliberate craniotomy is always wrong. ON the other hand, if you're trying to save both, but a baby tragically dies because of a traumatic attempted forceps delivery, that's a different matter. The outcome would be the same (one dead baby, one live one) but the act that resulted in the decease of one of the babies was not deliberately lethal. It was an attempted live delivery for both.
So, I was right the first time, misunderstood some of the later comments, and thought I had misunderstood the article. OK, thanks for clearing it up.
Siamese Twins prove the lie of "it's MUH body and I can do to it what I want". Separate hearts and and brains and all that.
I don't fault this girl for her sister's death or her parents' decision, more to the point of the issue of abortion in general.
The Hilton Sisters were permitted to get married and cast separate election ballots.
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