“I hope I don’t get sepsis, because I won’t leave this place,” the 30-year-old mother sent her a series of distraught text messages just 12 hours before her death.
Isabella was hospitalized after giving birth prematurely at 22 weeks gestation.
Only a few weeks ago, her fetus was said to have Edwards syndrome, a rare hereditary disorder. Most people diagnosed with the condition die before they are born. Her doctor told her to prepare for the consequences.
Isabella has broken heart, her sister-in-law Barbara Skrobol told CNN. She really wanted a baby, the brother of her 9-year-old daughter.
However, after the fetal anomaly was diagnosed, Isabella sought an abortion for medical reasons.
“They went to a Polish doctor and asked if they could have an abortion,” Skrobol said.
From her hospital bed in Pszczyna, southern Poland, Isabella explained to her mother that doctors were waiting for the fetal heart to stop beating before surgery with a Caesarean section to avoid sepsis. .. By the body’s reaction to the infection.
“My life is at stake,” she said in a text message.
“Doctors can’t help as long as the fetus is alive because of the abortion ban,” she wrote. “Women are like incubators.”
Isabella was taken to the operating room when the scan revealed that the fetus had died. However, according to a lawyer in her family, Isabella was in cardiac arrest and she died on her way there.
However, the official cause of death has not been announced. And it’s unclear why Isabella’s doctor didn’t have an abortion.
For nearly 30 years, abortion, primarily in Catholic countries, has three situations: pregnancy as a result of rape or incest, the life of the mother at risk, or fetal abnormalities. Was only allowed.
But when the Conservative Law and Justice (PiS) Party came to power in 2015, they promised to make the law even stricter, and the fetus, the most frequently used case of abortion, accounts for 98%. Said to get rid of the anomalous exception. All known legal abortions in Poland in 2019, according to data from the Polish Ministry of Health.
Opposition prevented the party from amending the law. However, in October 2020, the Polish Constitutional Court (the Supreme Court of the State) ruled that it was unconstitutional for a woman to end her pregnancy in the event of a fetal abnormality, saying that the exception constitutes “a euphoric act”. Did.
Within a year of the ruling, Isabella died.
A preliminary criminal investigation was then initiated by the Katowice District Prosecutor’s Office.
Polish President Andrzej Duda examined Isabella’s case at a press conference last year and asked why the abortion did not occur and why her life was not saved.
“Hospital doctors didn’t have an abortion, so we have to answer why it happened and why the woman’s life wasn’t saved,” Duda said.
Pszczyna County Hospital has denied any misconduct. We will not discuss any further details regarding the case with CNN.
In a statement on the website posted in November, the hospital wrote that the doctors involved in the case were suspended while the investigation continued.
“Doctors and midwives have worked hard to fight for patients and their children,” the hospital said.
The hospital said it shared the pain of all those affected by Isabella’s death, especially her family.
“… It should be emphasized that all medical decisions were made in light of the legal provisions and standards of conduct in force in Poland,” the hospital said.
The Polish government defended the law in a statement to the CNN, stating that “abortion remains legal if women’s lives are at stake.”
“It’s really hard to be a woman in Poland”
Poland and Malta are the only European Union member states that maintain highly restrictive abortion laws.
Nikodem Bernaciak, a legal analyst at the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, a conservative anti-abortion pressure group, told CNN that the law was about supporting the Constitution.
“The Constitutional Court has determined that all human life also means newborn life,” Bernasiak said.
However, reproductive rights activists say Poland’s increasingly stringent abortion law puts women like Isabella at risk.
Justyna Wydrzynska of Doula, an activist of the abortion rights network, has been in prison for three years for sending abortion medicine to a pregnant woman who said she was exposed to domestic violence. She admits that Wydrzynska helps women, but she has been acquitted and she will be tried in July.
“This is how patriarchy works here and deprives us of reproductive rights,” Widdlezinska told CNN. “It’s really hard to be a woman in Poland.”
In Poland, self-administration of abortion medications is legal, but it cannot help others.
Wydrzynska said Polish women were under unprecedented attack. She said women who are thinking of having an abortion are now hesitant to seek advice from doctors, and instead she explained that she is coming to activists like her for help.
“It’s scary that we are responsible for those people,” she said. “They have no psychological support.”
Some of the most difficult calls she had to give birth to were from women like Isabella who had been tested for fetal abnormalities, and they knew they couldn’t survive the birth. I know I have to keep carrying.
“It’s sometimes difficult for us to hear this,” she said. “They have to leave the country as a kind of criminal and seek help elsewhere.”
Last year, ADT and borderless abortion helped 1,540 Polish women travel abroad for abortion, according to Wydrzynska.
Dr. Magdalena Dutch of the Warsaw Institute for Women’s Health noted the financial burden on women who chose to travel abroad for abortion and said the law imposes penalties on the poorest people in Poland. ..
“This is a big inequality because not everyone has the money to go to Slovakia to have an abortion. As a doctor, I am supposed to help everyone equally.
Even within Poland, the law states that it is equivalent to a “place lottery” for women whose lives can be endangered by pregnancy.
“If you live in Warsaw and we can come to this open hospital and discuss it … we may have a slightly different interpretation of the law, and we are afraid No, “she said.
But the law already has a chilling effect, she said.
Activists often hesitate to ask for help from women, and some doctors perform an abortion if it is perceived that it is too fast to provide an abortion, even in situations where the mother’s life is at stake. Say you’re worried about the consequences of that-as in Isabella’s case.
Dutsch told CNN that he could not understand the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade case. She has a fundamental right to the decision to have an abortion.
“I’m shocked that this freedom of choice is being deprived of women,” she says-even in the United States, where she considered “freedom.”
Anna Odzeniak of CNN contributed to the press.
Source: www.cnn.com
