Life Links 10-18-11
by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat
- According to Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, a woman in China who was 6 months pregnant died during a forced abortion:
“More than ten persons from the Family Planning Bureau came, took off the oxygen mask from her and forced her to induce labor. From the time she was put into operating room at 4:00 p.m., there was no news about her….
At night around 10:00 p.m., someone came, opened the door of the delivery room and slipped away. We ran into the delivery room and saw that the doctors and nurses all disappeared while poor Jihong Ma’s body had already been totally freezing cold, with purple lips and bleeding nose, lying on the operating table without any movement….”
- In Tennessee, Shelby County commissioners voted 9-4 to give Christ Community Health Services their county’s contract for family planning. Planned Parenthood was the previous recipient of this contract.
- A local Oklahoma news station has the story of Stacie Crimm – a woman who refused chemotherapy for an aggressive brain cancer because she was pregnant – and her daughter Dottie (pictured left):
She laughed and cried all at once that day in March as she explained that five pregnancy tests showed she would be having a child. It was a joyous surprise at age 41 but even more so because she’d been told she would never be able to get pregnant, said her brother, Ray Phillips.
But even as she shopped for clothes for the child she longed to hold in her arms, she knew something was not right….
At her family’s encouragement, she visited a number of doctors. In July, a CT scan revealed that she had head and neck cancer.
… Phillips said she agonized only for a while before deciding against taking potentially lifesaving chemotherapy in hopes that she would soon hold a healthy baby in her arms….
When his sister regained consciousness [after her heart stopped and an emergency C-section was performed], Phillips asked what she thought about possibly seeing Dottie. Crimm’s eyes popped open and she raised her hands as if to ask where was her child.
Nurses wheeled Dottie down the hallway to her mother moments later. Phillips said doctors, nurses and others clad in protective gear gathered as nurses carefully lifted the baby from the incubator under her mother’s watchful eye.
They placed the baby on her mother’s chest. Mother and child gazed into each other’s eyes for several minutes. She smiled at the baby who at last lay in her arms.
No one said a word. No one had a dry eye. Stacie Crimm died three days later.
The false-positive rate — when the test incorrectly said that a baby would have Down syndrome — was 0.2 percent….
The test can be used as early as 10 weeks into a pregnancy, though half of the samples tested in the study were from the second trimester, meaning 15 weeks or more.
In order for the invasive cells to circumvent the mother’s white blood cells, the placenta secretes the protein PP13 into the mother’s blood as a diversion…. White blood cells are the foot soldiers of the human immune system and although they would normally defend the arteries in the uterus, the white blood cells instead attack the decoy PP13, leaving the arteries unprotected. The entire area around the PP13 secretion becomes inflamed and filled with the mother’s dead white blood cells, while the placental cells destroy the arteries, increasing blood flow and nutrient supply to the baby….
“The finding was completely unexpected,” [researcher Harvey] Kliman said. “For such death and destruction to be a normal part of pregnancy is shocking.”
In the absence of PP13, the attacking cells are destroyed and the intact arteries prevent enough blood from reaching the baby. In response, the placenta releases signals that increase the mother’s blood pressure in an attempt to increase blood flow, causing the mother to develop preeclampsia.
Kliman said uncovering this mechanism may lay the basis for providing diagnosis and treatment options to pregnant women who develop preeclampsia. Doctors may now be able to detect women who are at risk for preeclampsia long before symptoms emerge, he said.
[Photos via preeclampsiasymptoms.com and newsok.com]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Can anyone explain to me why Dottie and her mother wouldn’t even be allowed to see each other?
Yeah for Shelby County TN! You CAN live without Planned Parenthood!
Carla, I’m guessing, but maybe it’s because Dottie was only 2 pounds and no doubt in the NICU, and her mother had coded and was on a ventilator and was unresponsive for a time. Not sure the article has all the details.
What a powerful and movie tearjerker of a story. :(
Carla, I thought the same thing at first, but after reading the story at the NewsOK site, I gathered that she was unconscious just after the birth. The tumor was wrapping itself around Stacie’s brain stem, and she had to be resuscitated more than once and was on a ventilator and sedated for several days after the C-section. Also, Dottie Mae was in ICU at only 2 lbs, 1 oz.
The mother-child bond is exceedingly important. My brother, born eight weeks early in 1961 by C-section due to hemolytic anemia, was not expected to survive for more than a day; but my mom insisted she be allowed to hold him while he was alive. Much to the surprise of the doctors (but not to my mom who had tremendous faith and was a stellar mother), he grew stronger and survived.
Thank you both.
It only makes sense to me that this hero of a mother be given the chance to see the child she lay down her life for.
Thank you for sharing about your brother and your mother, Eric.
Greater love hath no mother than that she lay down her life for her child.
“a woman in China who was 6 months pregnant died during a forced abortion:“More than ten persons from the Family Planning Bureau came, took off the oxygen mask from her and forced her to induce labor.”
You lousy commie scum suckers.
Come on Jasper, tell us how you really feel. :)
In China, a woman’s body is not her own. It is the domain of the state. You can see the violence that follows.