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I don't think we do her memory any favours by presuming facts not currently in evidence. The husband obviously feels she was very wronged, and the least he can expect is an impartial, independent review of what went wrong. Long term, I don't think the abortion on demand viewpoint does itself any favours if it turns out that the lack of an abortion was not the main contributory factor to her death. Index of Frank's Diaries
So 'well, duh' would be entirely fair and accurate.
Certainly it's difficult to imagine any doctor without religious bias saying 'It's true you have a dead foetus inside you, but let's just leave it there and see if your condition improves, eh?'
It's true that Savita might have died anyway. But it's surely obvious that the odds of death would have been very greatly reduced to the point where it was very unlikely she would die - as opposed to the medical inaction which made it far more likely she would die.
So far as I can tell, medicine doesn't offer certainties.
But the reality is that any unbiased medical facility would have treated the situation as a medical emergency and aborted immediately, knowing this would tilt the balance of probability away from likely death to likely survival, and that this was a valuable and ethical thing to do.
The foetus died on the Wednesday, which was an entirely predictable outcome.
So was the ensuing life-threatening septicaemia, and the shift to ICU.
Pretending there are grey areas around this is disingenuous.
Expect religionists to argue that as long as there was a heartbeat there was hope of a miracle. I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS
The foetus had a heartbeat but the prognosis was that it would not survive.
This is like keeping a braindead patent alive because it has a heartbeat. I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS
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