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"Depraved
Indifference" Copyright © 2004, Mickey Z. All Rights Reserved. Melissa
Ann Rowland, 28, of Salt Lake City was pregnant with twins. Her doctors
claim they warned her about complications requiring a Caesarean section.
Without the procedure, they believed the unborn twins might not survive.
According to a nurse, Rowland refused the C-section because she didn't
want scars. Rowland's
attorney, Michael Sikora, says his client has a long history of mental
illness. He called a C-section major surgery and explained, "It
would come as no surprise that a woman with major mental illness would
fear it." Only
one of the twins survived childbirth. Melissa
Ann Rowland, 28, of Salt Lake City was arrested and charged with one
first-degree felony count of criminal homicide: "depraved indifference
to human life." If convicted, she faces between five years and
life in prison. As
of this writing, many things are unclear, i.e. whether Rowland was warned,
how she was warned, if and why she ignored the warning, along with any
useful details about her mental state. The media has dutifully run photos
of Rowland in an pinkish prison jumpsuit; hair splayed out in all directions...fulfilling
any spectator's notion of what a mother with "depraved indifference
to human life" might look like. One source is now reporting she
was convicted of child endangerment in Pittsburgh nearly four years
ago. Unexamined in the press reports is the efficacy of the C-section
and the state of women's health care in America. We'll get to those
in a moment. One tangential issue raised in an Associated Press article
involved "the prosecution of mothers who smoke or don't follow
their obstetrician's diet." "It's
very troubling to have somebody come in and say we're going to charge
this mother for murder because we don't like the choices she made,"
said Marguerite Driessen, a law professor at Brigham Young University. I'm
no fan of taxpayer subsidized lung cancer, but we're talking about arresting
women for smoking...not because they might hurt themselves but all in
the name of protecting the unborn (sound familiar?). If you really wanna
go the police state route, what about potential fathers who knowingly
engage in unhealthy habits? It takes two...as they say. As for the obstetrician's
dietary suggestions, well, I've written plenty about that topic so I'll
remind readers that the typical American doctor sits through only two
to four classroom hours of nutrition during medical school ...and leave
it at that. Ruth
Hubbard is professor emerita of biology at Harvard and the first woman
to be given a tenured biology professorship there. "The so-called
war on drugs has produced a situation in which a single blood test on
a pregnant woman or a newborn is sufficient to label that woman a drug
abuser and call in the state," she says. "I suppose most people
would agree that it is not a good thing for pregnant women to drink
excessive amounts of alcohol or to smoke or use drugs. But if the state
wants to protect a fetus, the way to do that is make it possible for
pregnant women-and women in general-to have access to proper housing,
food, jobs, a decent living environment, and good prenatal care." What
qualifies as good prenatal care, however, is not so easily defined...which
brings us back to the C-section procedure. "Our birth practices are crazy," says author and health advocate, John Robbins. "We have a Caesarean rate of 23 percent, which means that nearly a quarter of our newcomers is surgically extracted from their mothers' wombs." This is not so shocking when one takes a look at the male- and profit-driven world of Western medicine. "Natural birth can take place anytime, day or night," says Robbins. "There's no telling how long the labor will last, and there's no predicting when the baby will emerge. Caesareans, on the other hand, can be arranged to take place at the convenience of the hospital and the obstetrician."
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