[wagglebee]

Prayers for this family!

Thread by Sopater.

Woman gives birth two days after dying

(UPI) - Doctors in Oxford, England, say they kept a woman's body alive for two days after her death to allow her to give birth.

The Daily Mail said Monday despite the fact professional ice skater Jayne Soliman was declared brain dead last week, doctors were able to keep her body alive long enough to deliver her unborn child via Cesarean section.

David Phillips, a fellow skater and friend of Soliman's, said Soliman was deemed legally dead last Wednesday after suffering a brain hemorrhage caused by a tumor.

The 41-year-old woman had been 25 weeks pregnant at the time, so doctors used large doses of steroids to speed up the unborn child's lung development.

Phillips said within 48 hours of Soliman's official death, she became the proud mother of a nearly 2 pound, 2 ounce girl.

"She lived to have a baby girl -- that was the one thing she wanted in her life," Phillips told the Mail of last Friday's birth.

"This would have been the best day of her life," he added later.

[wagglebee]

Eluana Englaro

Italian doctors are making it clear that they understand that a doctor's role is to help people not kill them.

Thread by me.

700 Italian Doctors ask that Eluana’s Life be Spared

ROME, January 13, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An open letter by doctors, circulated before Christmas, asking that Eluana Englaro be spared death by dehydration has grown from 44 to over 700 signatures. The letter says that physicians have a “professional and scientific duty” to provide hydration and nutrition to a patient who is not capable of feeding himself.

The case of Eluana Englaro, the young woman in a state of diminished consciousness whose father has campaigned in the courts to have her food and hydration removed, continues to make headlines in Italy. In November, the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appeals court in Rome ruled that Eluana could be dehydrated to death.

The open letter, however, states that if the decree of the Court of Cassation allowing the killing of Eluana is applied that will be an attack against the “basic rules of good medical practice as established in the declaration of Helsinki.”

Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, carried comments today from Luigi Tesio, a signatory of the letter and professor of physical therapy at the university of Milan, underlining that the duty of the medical doctor is to “take care of handicapped patients and not to let them die.”

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