Profiles in Medical Ethics

This from the NYT:

After two cesarean sections, Rinat Dray wanted to give birth naturally.

But when she arrived at Staten Island University Hospital in labor, the doctor immediately began pressuring her, she said, to have a C-section.

The doctor told her the baby would be in peril and her uterus would rupture if she did not; he told her that she would be committing the equivalent of child abuse and that her baby would be taken away from her, she said in an interview this week.

After several hours of trying to deliver vaginally and arguing with the doctors, Mrs. Dray was wheeled to an operating room, where her baby was delivered surgically.

The hospital record leaves little question that the operation was conducted against her will: “I have decided to override her refusal to have a C-section,” a handwritten note signed by Dr. James J. Ducey, the director of maternal and fetal medicine, says, adding that her doctor and the hospital’s lawyer had agreed.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/nyregion/mother-accuses-doctors-of-forcing-a-c-section-and-files-suit.html?hp&_r=0