When does life begin?
What a simple question, yet so controversial.
When I looked at Kylie’s death certificate for the first time, I got so angry that my body literally started shaking. My physician was forced to sign her death certificate that said the following: ”I certify that this fetus was born dead…”
Only Kylie was born alive and lived for 80 minutes.
She had a brain, a heart, a stomach…
She had arms and legs, 10 fingers and toes…
She had perfectly a formed nose, ears and eyes…
She moved her arms and legs and turned her head to my voice…
She had a soul, the very being of who she really was – within her bodily shell…
She was a baby, in every sense of the word – yet, dictated by State Law:
“not a viable fetus”
My doctor signed this document solely to protect the hospital from any lawsuits for not intervening on her behalf. For she was only 22.5 weeks gestation, not 24 and therefore considered not viable, not worthy to live per State Law.
Why was it the government’s responsibility to decide whether my child should live or die; to bind the hands of my doctor and to not equip hospitals to care for children like her? To give us a “choice” of what to do, while creating a situation where the only option was to do nothing?
While my husband and I made the decisions we did and found peace they were the right ones to make, we still want to see hospitals change their policies. To provide true options to care for these micro-premies. To stop binding the hands of doctors. To be proactive and stop premature labor, instead of allowing women to miscarry. To enable these decisions to be in the hands of the parents, not the government!
We have been so hurt that this hospital didn’t recognize that our child lived. They never acknowledged her as a person, for they were too concerned with covering their backsides. To them, she was simply a “fetus”, as some would describe – a ball of tissue, not worth saving.
But to us, at the very moment of conception, she was a baby.
A child that I was willing to give my life for.
She was our own flesh and blood, our little girl!
She was our sweet, beautiful gift from God!
To read more about our story, see: Choosing Heaven.
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I find your strength amazing. I’m so sorry for the loss of your daughter. It’s infuriating to me that they didn’t recognize that she lived, breathed and no doubt loved her mommy and daddy while she was here.
Thank you Karen! =)
I hope that the idea that an embryo has no feelings, that a fetus is just a blank slate-in-the-making is fast fading from society’s belief systems. But just in case some of us still don’t think we can influence a baby till it’s born, take a lok at “From Fetus to Child,” by psychoanalyst A. Piontelli. She sat day after day with obstetricians watching for an hour at a time how fetuses behaved in the womb. Her camera was a sonogram, peering into the uterine world to discover the truth about prenatal life.
Though she is a highly educated researcher and practicing analyst and psychotherapist, Dr. Piontelli writes in a style almost as easy to follow as a newspaper human interest story, with few technical words to stumble over.
One could not stumble past her eye-witness accounts of fetus after fetus, which became single or twin births and demonstrated with no doubt remaining how the earliest developmental stage studied was mirrored by the behavior of newborn, toddler, and up to the four-year-old, her age limit to study.
Nature vs nurture is studied in action. And some of each appears to contribute to the behavior of the children as they grow.
Expectant parents, health care workers, midwives… Here’s a book I’d highly recommend.
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I’m so sorry you lost your baby this way. Kylie should have had a birth certifcate and a proper death certificate. It is terrible that the hospital/government wrote a fetal death certificate and did not acknowledge that she was born alive. Protecting against lawsuits should be the last thing on anyone’s mind when a premie this small is born. Every bit of care should have been given to your daughter. I am so sorry…