Whose Life Is It Anyway?*

Obviously not your own, if you live in Florida:

FLA. WOMAN FIGHTS RULING THAT KEPT HER IN HOSPITAL

Samantha Burton wanted to leave the hospital. Her doctor strongly disagreed, enough to go to court to keep her there. She smoked cigarettes during the first six months of her pregnancy and was admitted on a false alarm of premature labor. Her doctor argued she was risking a miscarriage if she didn’t quit smoking immediately and stay on bed rest in the hospital, and a judge agreed. Three days after the judge ordered her not to leave the hospital, Burton delivered a stillborn fetus by cesarean section. And six months after the pregnancy ended, the dispute over the legal move to keep her in the hospital continues, raising questions about where a mother’s right to decide her own medical treatment ends and where the priority of protecting a fetus begins.

[Burton] didn’t want an abortion, had obtained prenatal care and voluntarily went to the hospital after experiencing symptoms she’d been told to look out for, he said. But she didn’t like the care she received at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. She said her doctor, Jana Bures-Foresthoefel, was brusque and overbearing…The mother said she wanted the option to seek care at another hospital or to go home so she could care for her two daughters. “I was desperately hoping to receive the care I needed to save my baby,” Burton wrote in her statement. “However, after a few days there, I did not feel I was receiving the care I needed, and instead of being allowed to leave or go to another hospital, I found myself being ordered by a judge to stay at Tallahassee Memorial and submit to all medical care from its hospital staff, whether I agreed or not.”

[Thanks to Mark Fee]
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*Title of a TV play, Broadway play, and movie concerning the right of a paralyzed sculptor to end his own life.

UPDATE: LRC author Don Cooper shares his personal memories of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital:

“I lived in Tallahassee, FL for 10 years and at one point was a pre-med student at Florida State University. As part of that program I was a volunteer in the emergency room at the hospital. On many occasions I saw people literally die from simple neglect. One particular case will haunt me for the rest of my life: a young man came in who had been in a car accident (and hadn’t been wearing his seat-belt). He had a blunt-force trauma to his chest; the doctor suspected he was bleeding internally and so ordered an MRI.

The nurses didn’t hurry; they didn’t rush him to radiology; nothing. All the time the poor kid was yelling and screaming and asking to call his mother. Finally, they got him to radiology at their leisure. As the results were being analyzed, the doctors were casually discussing how nice the images were from the new MRI machine and so on and so forth; again, absolutely no sense of urgency. All the while the poor guy was still complaining and saying he was in pain and asked what was going on.

Finally, they got him to the OR. The moment they opened his chest he went into cardiac arrest and died. The internal bleeding had built up so much pressure on his heart that when it was released it was too much for it to take.

I quit the pre-med program the next day and became an economist.

I remember to this day telling my friends and family that if I were every seriously hurt to never take me to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.”

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3:17 pm on January 26, 2010