(RightWing.org) – Many couples spend nine months anticipating with joy the arrival of a new member to their family. However, in too many cases, the long-awaited day can turn into the most heart-wrenching of times if something goes horribly wrong. Sometimes that can be an unforeseen medical issue; other times, the baby is stillborn, and then there are the times when the doctor makes a horrible decision or mistake.
Questionable Choices
On April 24, at a hospital just outside of Belo Horizonte, Brazil (approximately 220 miles north of Rio de Janeiro), Ranielly Coelho Santos was admitted when she was around 28 weeks pregnant because her blood pressure was running high. About a week later, her doctors decided to induce labor, even after the woman requested a cesarean section and informed the team working on her that she had already been advised to have one. That was the beginning of what was likely to be a lifelong nightmare for her and her husband.
Based on media reports, it appears that some sort of problem arose that the unnamed female obstetrician felt required some unusual and ultimately unfortunate measures. After calling the father, who was also not identified by name, over to the delivery bed, the doctor allegedly climbed up on the mother’s stomach, presumably to help push the baby out, and then reached down to help guide it from the womb.
With the father looking on, he claims the doctor tried to pull his daughter out into the world but instead managed to decapitate the baby. If that isn’t horrifying enough, what the hospital did next has made them the target of outrage across the country.
The hospital allegedly asked the distraught couple to sign a document saying that the baby had already died in the womb and allowing them to do any autopsy in-house. In exchange, they would pay for all burial costs. However, the husband claims that he saw the infant blinking her eyes and moving her mouth, making him believe she was alive, so instead of signing the document, they filed a police report.
While horror stories of this nature appear to be exceedingly rare, a St. Louis, Missouri, area woman by the name of Arteisha Betts suffered a similar experience in 2011, also in her 28th week of pregnancy. Like Santos, she claims her doctor refused to perform a cesarean section, and when her baby became stuck in the birth canal, the physician applied traction to the head and decapitated the child. The mother also alleged that the doctor pushed the head back into the birth canal and then ordered a C-section in an attempt to cover up his ghastly error.
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