TRIGGER WARNING
A 9-year-old girl who was carrying twins, allegedly after being raped by her stepfather, underwent an abortion Wednesday despite complaints from Brazil's Roman Catholic church.Police said the stepfather has been jailed since last week.
Abortion is illegal in Brazil, but judges can make exceptions if the mother's life is in danger or the fetus has no chance of survival.
Fatima Maia, director of the public university hospital where the abortion was performed, said the 15-week-old pregnancy posed a serious risk to the 80-pound (36-kilogram) girl.
"She is very small. Her uterus doesn't have the ability to hold one, let alone two children," Maia told the Jornal do Brasil newspaper.
But Marcio Miranda, a lawyer for the Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife in northeastern Brazil, said the girl should have carried the twins to term and had a cesarean section.
"It's the law of God: Do not kill. We consider this murder," Miranda said in comments reported by O Globo.
The story alone is unbelievably sad. She's nine years old, the age of a U.S. third grader.
Brazil's Cesarean rate in private hospitals is over 90%. It averages around 40% in public hospitals. The operation is seen as no big deal and apparently that goes for young child victims of rape as well.
Since I deal with the other end of the reproductive cycle, i.e., informed refusal of unnecessary surgery and intervention in pregnancy and labor, I wonder if I've been oblivious to a new wave of anti-choice rhetoric. In this technocratic medical climate in which c-sections are increasingly promoted by doctors as the safe and healthy alternative to vaginal birth and are usually readily available, has there been a push for women to swap one medical procedure (abortion) with another (c-section) to keep the fetus alive?
I've tried searching all kinds of things like "Cesarean as safe alternative to abortion" and what-not and I'm not coming up with much. I hope that it's just isolated to a few sick Catholic church officials in Brazil who think it would be justified to sacrifice a nine year old who has probably endured rape for years with her stepfather thinking pregnancy wasn't possible because she is so young.
Have Cesareans entered the anti-choice "alternative" agenda? Or has the argument always been there and am I just outing myself as a reproductive health n00b?
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I have heard of this, sort of. "You can just have a C-section" is an argument that sometimes gets bandied about as a reason not to get an abortion. I can almost kind of see the logic here if I close my eyes and concentrate. Maybe because that way you don't "really have to give birth?"
Of course, if you have half a brain you realize that a C-section is still giving birth, it's surgery, it can have side-effects and complications, and oh, by the way, there will still be those pesky 9 months of pregnancy involved...not really seeing how it's somehow better than either vaginal birth of or abortion of an unwanted pregnancy. So I'm not sure what people were thinking, but hey, that's anti-choice logic for you.
Yes, I wonder if that's it. The idea that it's "not really giving birth" since the baby doesn't leave through the pelvis, so it will be much easier on the mother. Or, in this case, the tiny pregnant child.
On the more recent thread about this story, someone mentioned that virgin birth and Catholicism go hand in hand, so maybe it's some kind of sick (lack of) logic there? Like if they take the babies out through her abdomen, no one needs to really acknowledge how they got in there in the first place.
I don't know. The story is tragic from start to finish except for the life-saving abortion.
Maybe they were saying a C-section was an alternative because they thought the health complications would stem from a 9 year old's pelvis not being developed enough to give birth safely? I don't really think that makes sense, but I could see how someone could think that.
Yeah, I think they think that the only issue is delivery. It's a real problem, many people believe pregnancy and birth is perfectly safe, but really annoying, or if it has any danger, it's just during labor. Of course, I doubt a 9-year-old carrying two fetuses could even survive to the point of their viability, given her small size and the strain pregnancy places on the body.
Plus, recovering from an abortion is a hell of a lot easier than recovering from a C-section. While C/S is a marvelous thing when it can save a baby that is wanted, forcing a child who doesn't want a child of their own to endure one, with all the risks (which are worse than normal because of her age, size, etc), is horrible.
thanks for this post...I've been researching this issue as well. I feel that we have entered a new age in anti-choice strategy, defining "personhood" and it is not only harmful to the abortion rights, but to pregnant & birthing women as well. I blogged about an anti-choice conference and some thoughts from J. Block's book "Pushed" back in January on the link between abortion rights and c-sections:
http://femography.blogspot.com/2009/01/anti-choicers-mapping-out-strategy.html
Great linked post. The Amber Marlowe case and all of the other court-ordered c-section cases are perfect examples of assuming erroneously that the mother's body is at war with the fetus and spontaneous vaginal birth is somehow contraindicated. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has an article about it- http://tinyurl.com/at25um.
With the c-section and surgery in general being safer than ever before, it would not surprise me if it gets promoted as a quick, neat and tidy way to just get an unwanted baby out alive. Quick, neat and tidy it is not, of course.