...the hospital sent her placenta to a Portland institute created and financed by the insurance industry, in part to help health care providers defend against birth-injury lawsuits.The Oregonian story reports that Cascadia is now called "Northwest Physicians Insurance Co.," but it seems to have been acquired by The Doctors Company. Among the gems on the DC website: "The combined use of new technologies and traditional guidelines is helping to replace the myth that "bad labor or delivery makes a bad baby" with the concept that a "bad baby makes a bad labor or delivery." The site includes guidelines for obstetric risk reduction, which essentially urge clinicians to perform childbirth as a process of defeating possibility liabilities.
The pathologist at the institute, Cascadia Placenta Registry, analyzed the tissue and drafted a report contending that McKenna's cerebral palsy was caused by blood flow problems, not improper care.
It wasn't until Desbiens sued Providence, four years after the birth, that she first read the report and learned what had become of her placenta, the organ that transports blood, oxygen and nutrients to a fetus.
The Kaiser summary mentions that laws may not have been broken, but let's call this what it is: hospitals taking one of the products of childbirth, without the mother's consent, in the interest of avoiding any possible responsibility for a bad outcome. How many women want their children's births viewed from this perspective?
Technorati Tags: childbirth; informed consent; malpractice; placenta
MeSH Tags: Defensive Medicine; Obstetrics/ethics OR /legislation and jurisprudence; Placenta;
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