Is Pregnancy a Disease?
Here is
a topic hot off the September-October 2014 Hastings Center Report, a bioethics journal, that should raise
a few eyebrows of agreement or rebuttal.
The point of the article
is if pregnancy is NOT a disease then healthcare providers who refuse to
perform abortions need not claim "conscience" as the basis for their
refusal but claim that pregnancy and abortion are not part of what medicine has
always been defined. The premise: "the scope of the very concept of
medicine and disease circumscribes the scope of proper medical practice. Procedures and activities that fall outside the scope of
medicine and disease are not properly within the brief of healthcare
personnel."
Currently, physicians
and other healthcare providers can refuse to provide abortions if it is against
their religious or moral views. However,
it also a social understanding that every employee 's responsibility toward his
or her occupation in terms including of "taking on a job" depends
specifically on the what society expects from those trained for that work. You don't expect a plumber to perform an
appendectomy or a physician to design or construct a highrise building as part
of the criteria of the profession of medicine. So the argument could be that the duty to
perform the work of healthcare is set by the standards set by the work itself
and to refuse an activity which has not been formally set is acceptable. Pregnancy
itself is not a abnormal condition or disorder of a healthy life and therefore
a disease and for a healthcare provider whose professional responsibility is to
attend to the issues of disease or the prevention of disease, to be compelled
to terminate a normal life function without a disease basis could be considered
professionally unacceptable. What do you think? What view do you hold?
...Maurice.
Graphic: Pregnancy. From
Google Images.
posted by Maurice Bernstein, M.D. @ 4:57:00 PM
9 comments
9 Comments:
I need to publish this comment in 2 parts.
This is part 2:
Published in reversed order for readability.
Look at the high rate of caesarians in the US and the rate of vaginal births after a caesarian is almost 0%. There is a backlash against caesarians which is why many women choose home birth and midwives.
Pregnant women put a lot of trust in their doctors and hospitals. But a Consumer Reports investigation of more than 1,500 hospitals in 22 states suggests that such trust may be misplaced. It found that in many hospitals, far too many babies enter this world through cesarean section.
While some C-sections are absolutely necessary for the health of the mother or baby, the high C-section rates in our low-scoring hospitals are “unsupportable by professional guidelines and studies of birth outcomes,” said Elliot Main, M.D., director of the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative and former chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, who reviewed our data.
Our Ratings reveal that C-section rates vary dramatically—even between neighboring hospitals. For example, almost 55 percent of pregnant women anticipating low-risk deliveries—that is, women who haven’t had a C-section before, don’t deliver prematurely, and are pregnant with a single baby who is properly positioned—nonetheless undergo a C-section at Los Angeles Community Hospital. But at California Hospital Medical Center, also in Los Angeles, the rate of C-sections for low-risk deliveries is 15 percent; at Western Medical Center Anaheim, 28 miles away, it’s about 11 percent.
Source: Consumer Reports
Why such a high rate of C-sections?
Some economists have suggested financial incentives may be at play; a 2013 paper by the Source: National Bureau of Economic Research determined doctors make a few hundred dollars more and hospitals make a few thousand dollars more for C-sections versus vaginal deliveries. That same paper found doctors were less likely to perform C-sections on mothers who were doctors, which they hypothesized was because medical knowledge made them less resistant to pressure.
Source:
Back to the abortion issue. In China practices of forced abortions, infanticide and involuntary sterilizations [are] all banned in theory by the government, but they still happen. Source:
I ask, are Chinese physicians allowed to become licensed and practice in the United States? Perhaps we should ban Chinese physicians from practicing in the US based on these same moral objections.
But wait, there is a shortage of physicians in the US and we need them to fill the gap. Source: NY Times article: America Is Stealing the World’s Doctors
Economic reasons (again)!
Perhaps the solution to the abortion debate is to make abortions more profitable like C-sections, plastic surgery, IVF, etc., and see what happens....
--Banterings
I need to publish this comment in 2 parts.
This is part 1:
Published in reversed order for readability.
Note: My position on the abortion debate is that I personally do not approve unless there are certain situations (risk to mother's life, incest, rape, etc.). That being said, I do not push my beliefs on anyone else. I do not believe in legislating morality either, hence I do not believe it should be illegal.
Let me pose this to you, if you oppose abortion based on the rational that it interferes with "a normal life process," would you also not oppose contraception based on the same principal (interfering with a normal life process)?
As to the "issues of disease or the prevention of disease;" What about plastic surgery for the sake of vanity? It is argued that there is a psychological component to the "mental wellbeing of the patient." Can this not also apply to an unwanted pregnancy? Is there an economic component to plastic surgery, mainly its profitability?
What about screening for disease and gender in IVF? Is this not a form of "plastic surgery" on a "normal life process?" Is there a profitability component to this too? (Remember profitability for later.)
Are there not cases where abortions are performed as an acceptable part of healthcare (ectopic pregnancy, risk to the mother slim chance of survival of the fetus, where the fetus is not viable, placenta bleed, etc.) ?
Are they taught in medical school? If not, how does one learn to do them?
If they are taught in medical school, then they are considered an accepted medical procedure. The physician's fiduciary duty to the patient (the benefit of the patient over the physician's own benefit) may compel physicians to perform them against their own moral judgement.
Can a physician refuse to treat a serial killer based on religious and moral objections, and under what circumstances?
Can a physician refuse to treat a transgender/bisexual/homosexual patient based on religious and moral objections, and under what circumstances?
Can a Muslim physician refuse to treat a Jewish patient under religious and moral objections?
These questions may provide insight to the ethical answer.
It seems that healthcare treats pregnancy as a disease. I know this strays from the topic of abortion, but supports healthcare treating pregnancy as a disease.
--Banterings
If pregnancy was a disease, then why are we trying to cure it?
See First womb-transplant baby born
If you can't do the full duties of a job due to your beliefs, you shouldn't have that job.
There are plenty of jobs in medicine where birth control, abortions, etc, will not be an issue in your career. If it is that important to you that you never provide someone with birth control, then get a job where providing birth control won't be asked of you.
-JR
yea! you have to take the full duties of the pregnant.
British government says giving birth at home or birthing centers with midwives is safer for 45% of women. Healthy women had more epidurals, more, cesarean sections, and more complications in maternity wards.
Reversing a generation of guidance on childbirth, Britain’s national health service advised it was safer to have their babies at home, or in a birth center, than in a hospital.
Women with uncomplicated pregnancies — about 45 percent of the total — were better off in the hands of midwives than hospital doctors during birth, according to new guidelines by the NICE.
Hospital births were more likely to end in cesarean sections or involve episiotomies, a government financed 2011 study carried out by researchers at Oxford University showed. Women were more likely to be given epidurals, which numb the pain of labor but also increase the risk of a protracted birth that required forceps and damaged the perineum.
The risk of death or serious complications for babies was the same in all three settings, with one exception: In the case of first-time mothers, home birth slightly increased that risk. Nine in 1,000 cases would experience serious complications, compared with five in 1,000 for babies born in a hospital.
Not everyone was at ease with the new guidelines. “Things can go wrong very easily and we do feel this advice could be dangerous,” Lucy Jolin of the Birth Trauma Association told the BBC.
So far doctors have not expressed any outrage over the decision. “If we had done this 20 years ago there would have been a revolution,” Dr. Baker said. “The penny has dropped. We’ve won the argument.”Source: NY Times
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence press release.
"The principal reason is because they are kept away from doctors with their knives." "We have over-medicalized delivery and are doing more harm than good as a result." --Professor Mark Baker, NICE’s clinical practice director and author of the new guidelines. Source: NBC News
So what is birth in the US like? Another case of physicians think that they know your body better than you...
Insane Hospital Threatens Mom Who Wants VBAC With CPS And Forced C-Section
Pregnant Mom Says Hospital Threatened To Call Child Services Unless She Has C-Section
Florida woman ordered to have a C-section against her will
Case of New Jersey woman who lost custody of baby because she refused a cesarean raises many issues
CPS removed Illinois baby after homebirth - can it happen to any of us?
What ever happened to first do no harm?
--Banterings
Very well articulated! I salute you!
I think that contraception and abortion better fit the paradigm of body modification than disease.
Both contraception and abortion run counter to the practice of medicine in that they seek to either thwart or halt normal, healthy biological proceses. This puts them outside the realm of medicine, which seeks to promote normal, healthy biological processes.
Christina, interesting with regard to "body modification than a disease". Should we look at another physician intrusion into a "body modification" as elective cosmetic surgery? Here the practice of medicine would also be "thwarting" or"halting" the "normal healthy biologic process" for the benefit of the patient and the financial benefit of the physician. ..Maurice.
To put this in perspective, I would argue that "living" is a disease; after all it is a terminal condition....
-- Banterings
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