GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Jehovah Witness woman in Quebec freely chose not to have transfusion and paid with her life

viernes, 24 de noviembre de 2017

BioEdge: Jehovah Witness woman in Quebec freely chose not to have transfusion and paid with her life

BioEdge: Jehovah Witness woman in Quebec freely chose not to have transfusion and paid with her life

Bioedge

Jehovah Witness woman in Quebec freely chose not to have transfusion and paid with her life

by Michael Cook | 18 Nov 2017 | 6 comments

Eloise Dupuis

A woman was within her rights to refuse a blood transfusion even if she risked dying, said the Quebec coroner this week.

Eloise Dupuis, 27, died in Quebec on October 12, 2016 of multiple organ failure and loss of blood after a Caesarean section. A Jehovah's Witness, she insisted that she did not want to receive a blood transfusion. The coroner, Luc Malouin, said that she had made a free and fully informed choice.

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that blood transfusions are forbidden by the Bible. Another Quebec woman of the same persuasion, 46-year-old Mirlande Cadet, died a few days earlier, on October 3, after complications in childbirth.

After studying the medical records, the coroner was convinced on Dupuis’s determination. She had said on five separate occasions that she did not want a transfusion. In studying her medical records, Malouin found five occasions when Dupuis told doctors she did not want a transfusion. “Refusal of transfusion even if death is the result,” one note said on the evening after she gave birth to her son Liam. After she was no longer able to give consent, her relatives, also Jehovah’s Witnesses, supported her decision.

The coroner noted that in Quebec, once deeply Catholic but now profoundly secular, religious convictions may be regarded with scepticism or even hostility, but people still have the right to live by them:

“At a time when a majority of Quebecers do not actively practise any religion, this notion of respecting religious rules seems to come from a different era. There was a time in Quebec when such rules were very present and governed the lives of all. It is no longer the situation today, but the choice to adhere or not to religious rules must be respected.”

And the law in Quebec is clear: adults of sound mind have a right to refuse medical treatment.

Several of our stories this week deal with end-of-life issues. For a bit of a change, how about an historical diversion?

“And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.” You might recognise this quote from the Bible. It is often used to illustrate the pain of infertility, which hurts no less 4,000 years later.

Jacob was a wandering pastoralist. But Turkish archaeologists announced this month that they had uncovered evidence of urban infertility in Kültepe, an Assyrian site in the centre of modern Turkey. It is a clay tablet with cuneiform script with a prenuptial agreement – also 4,000 years old. It may be the first pre-nup in recorded history.

If, after two years, the bride has still not borne a child, the tablet says, the wife will allow her husband to use a female slave as a surrogate mother to produce an heir. The slave would be freed after giving birth to a son.

Many ethical issues in the Reproductive Revolution have precedents, but it’s amazing to see that today’s surrogate mothers were anticipated by Assyrian slave girls four millennia ago.