Expert: Abortion would have improved chances of woman who died from ruptured uterus [View all]

[ck4829]

A miscarrying woman who died in an Irish hospital should have had her blood poisoning detected much sooner and been offered an abortion to improve her odds of survival, an experts' report concluded Thursday in a case that is forcing Ireland to modernize its abortion laws.

The 108-page report into the October death of Savita Halappanavar documented what the lead investigator described as "a cascade of mistakes" overshadowed by officials' refusal to remove the fetus until its heart stopped beating.

That took four days. By then, the report found, the woman's ill-diagnosed sepsis from a ruptured uterus already had reached lethal levels.

"If it was my case, I would have terminated the pregnancy," Dr. Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, a London professor of obstetrics and gynecology who led the seven-month probe, said. The five investigators found that a chain of doctors and nurses all failed to take proactive steps to identify and halt the spread of infection throughout her body.

http://news.yahoo.com/expert-dying-woman-got-irish-abortion-184528492.html

Not their fault, the law there says they have to pretty much place a dying fetus over a living woman. The anti-choicers talk about a culture of life, but what they create wherever abortion bans are passed is a culture of fear.