An obstetrician beheaded a baby during childbirth in Scotland in 2014. Four years later, the mother looks back on this terrible ordeal.
This tragedy, which occurred in March 2014 in Scotland, is chilling. At the time 25 weeks pregnant, Laura, a young woman of 30, presents to Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. Her cervix is very little dilated. Her premature baby has an unusually slow heartbeat and has not turned around.
Despite all these elements and the opinion of her colleagues in favor of a cesarean section, Dr Vaishnavy Vilvanathan Laxman decides to deliver her patient vaginally. “I was not given gas or air – I was in pain. The doctors put their hands inside me and pushed me on my stomach,” the patient told the court recently. “I tried to get out of bed, but they pulled me back three times and told me they had to take the baby out. They tried twice to cut my cervix and no one only told me they were going to do it. There was no anesthesia. I told them: It’s not going, stop, I don’t want to do it. “
“My son was still in me but his body was resting on a table”
Interviewed by the BBC, Laura says today: “I kept telling myself that something was wrong.” After 25 minutes, “I felt a pop”. The young woman thinks that her little boy has finally been born, but amazement overwhelms the medical team and Laura is immediately anesthetized. When she wakes up, the obstetrician tells her that her baby is still born and apologizes to her. “I told him that I forgave him because at the time I had no idea what had happened.” Eventually, she discovers that her son’s head was stuck in his too little dilated cervix and that the doctor pulled so hard that the little one was born decapitated. Two other doctors then performed a Caesarean section to get the head out, which was “stitched up” to the baby’s body so that the young mother could bid him farewell. “My son was still in me but his body was resting on a table.”
Experts from the Medical Practitioners Tribunal heard from both parties: according to them, the doctor’s decision to give birth by whisper “triggered a series of events that caused the baby to be beheaded.” “VSowing to the risks “, Dr Vaishnavy Vilvanathan Laxman should have performed a cesarean section. However, the latter was not found guilty of his death, since the baby had already died in-utero. Justice therefore refused to judge the obstetrician for murder or accident causing death. “It is as if I was told that my son never existed,” says Laura.
A similar drama in Brazil
A similar drama took place on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at Santa Isabel Hospital, in northern Aracaju, Brazil. There, too, the baby had his shoulders stuck in his mother’s vagina and by pulling, the doctors unhooked his head. The mother was then immediately taken to the surgery room to undergo a cesarean section in order to urgently remove the rest of the child’s body.
Is there a risk in France?
Normally, these cases of decapitation of the baby at birth, fortunately extremely rare, cannot take place in France. The High Authority for Health (HAS) has in fact identified the clinical situations that could lead to a planned cesarean: the scarred uterus, twin pregnancy, breech presentation, macrosomia *, mother-to-child transmission of maternal infection, rarer indications (covering placenta previa, for example).
For each of them, the HAS has redefined the indications for scheduled cesarean sections and those which should lead to vaginal delivery. If the pregnant woman presents medical elements other than those mentioned in the recommendation, the choice must be made on the basis of the analysis of the benefit-risk balance for the mother and for the fetus.
7% of deliveries are done by caesarean section in France, but the rate can climb to 43% in some regions, making a total of more than 100,000 procedures per year.
.
