“I have decided to override her refusal to have a C-section”

A woman named Rinat Dray is suing her doctors and Staten Island University Hospital after being forced into a C-section:

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.

Her bladder was cut during the surgery, and her doctor (“he told her that she would be committing the equivalent of child abuse and that her baby would be taken away from her”) sounds like a real horror:

At first, she said, Dr. Gorelik appeared to relent, saying he would give her an epidural for the pain and then reconsider. “I was begging, give me another hour, give me another two hours,” Mrs. Dray said. Her mother, who was there, supported her, and the doctor said, “I’m not bargaining here.” Mrs. Dray said she kept begging on the operating table. His answer, she recalled, was, “Don’t speak.”

The doctor claims that the baby would have been in serious danger without the C-section, but of course this case “raises issues about the rights of pregnant women to control their own bodies, even if that might compromise the life of a fetus.”

Dr. Howard Minkoff, chairman of obstetrics at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn… said he believed that women had an absolute right to refuse treatment even if it meant the death of an unborn child. “In my worldview, the right to refuse is uncircumscribed,” Dr. Minkoff said, cautioning that he was not commenting on the particular facts of Mrs. Dray’s case. “I don’t have a right to put a knife in your belly ever.”

[NYTimes]