Pregnant women with fetal abnormalities: the forgotten people in the abortion debate

Abstract

Abortion law reform focuses on early abortion. Women wanting to have a family who have a fetal abnormality detected later in pregnancy are neglected in the debate and harmed by the consequences of current legal uncertainty. Unclear abortion laws compromise: the quality of prenatal testing; management when an abnormality is found; and patient care, through obstetricians’ fears of legal repercussions. Women carrying a fetus with an abnormality are being denied abortion, even when the abnormality is so severe that non‐treatment would be an option if the baby were born. Many women are likely to refuse to consider motherhood if they are denied appropriate prenatal testing and access to abortion if serious abnormalities are detected. Current abortion laws result in discriminatory and inconsistent practices, where access to prenatal testing and termination of pregnancy depends on location, the values of the treating doctor or hospital ethics committee, and a woman's personal resources. Legal certainty is needed to reduce the suffering of couples wanting to have a family.

Doctors Have no Right to Refuse Medical Assistance in Dying, Abortion or Contraception

“…It is correct that doctors are moral agents like any one of us who is capable of making moral choices. The place of reasons and values in medicine is properly located in dialogue with patients, 23 and in attempting to shape policy and law, as we have done in the case of changing the law around abortion, 24 and euthanasia. 25 However, we are not entitled to impose those values on patients in the delivery of health care and deny treatment when these patients are legally entitled to access that particular service.…”

Pregnant women with fetal abnormalities: the forgotten people in the abortion debate

“…To the Editor : Superficially, de Crespigny and Savulescu make a compelling case for clarifying late‐term abortion law 1 . However, at a deeper level, it is disappointing that alternative points of view were not discussed in their article.…”

Pregnant women with fetal abnormalities: the forgotten people in the abortion debate

“…To the Editor : The recent article by de Crespigny and Savulescu 1 is nominally about the medical care of pregnant women, but its ramifications extend more widely into power relations, law and ethics, and matters of life and death.…”

“…The prenatal care they seem to have in mind can hardly be called care of the child: can it be called care of the mother? In one of the cases cited, a woman at Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital was threatening suicide unless her pregnancy was terminated after a diagnosis of dwarfism at 31 weeks 1 . Instead of providing her with urgent psychiatric care (had they never encountered a suicidal patient before?…”

“…Doctors need to pay close attention to the short paragraph on conscientious objection 1 . The authors declare that “a doctor's conscience should not be allowed to interfere with medical care” and that if “some individuals or institutions have moral objections ... those objections cannot compromise patient care”.…”