In this decadent culture of abortion on demand and embryo-destructive experimentation, does a doctor have any obligation whatsoever to bother about a preborn child?You think that's a monstrous question to even consider?
Well, a group of three doctors and four nurses of Guelph General Hospital in Ontario, Canada went further than asking the question. They staked a legal claim that there was no such responsibility at all. That's right -- despite all the scientific evidence of fetology which incontrovertibly establishes that the preborn child is one of us...despite ultrasounds and fetal monitoring...despite the ubiquitous admonitions from the medical community about prenatal care...and despite the burgeoning field of fetal surgery...this obstetric medical team nevertheless insisted that even in a childbirth situation, they owed no duty of care to the unborn child they delivered!
Their only obligation was the health of the mother.
The parents of Kevin Liebig, born with brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation and since diagnosed with cerebral palsy too, have fought a 7-year legal battle against the hospital and members of its staff, arguing that Kevin's condition is due to the fact that his mother was given too much oxytocin during his delivery.
But rather than defending themselves on the grounds that they properly performed their duties regarding surgical preparation, anesthesia, the monitoring of both patients, and the delivery itself, the medical team chose as their legal defense that they actually had no binding obligation at all to the health and well-being of the child!
Their lawyers cited two recent Ontario examples in which judges had determined that a physician does not have a duty of care to a woman's "future children," even if those children were already present in utero, but only to the woman.
Thankfully, this court did not buy into such a farcical, brutish defense.
"The duty to both mother and fetus in the maternal-fetal care scenario has been long established in Canadian jurisprudence," wrote Justice Wolfram Tausendfreund for the Ontario Superior Court. "The existence of the duty of care owed by physicians and nurses to a fetus has been recognized by numerous trial decisions across Canada. Rhetorically, I must ask why the medical profession would see the need for such fetal monitoring, but for the recognition of the obligation to both mother and the fetus during the labour and delivery process?"
The legal battle can continue.
