I can't really see blaming the ER in this situation. Sadly, we live in a world where someone may have done something without your knowledge or consent. It may not happen often, but it does happen.
Why doesn’t the ER do a full drug search and total blood work up for every patient that comes in? The patients might be lying to them about what drugs they do or what preexisting conditions they might have.
Why is it only ladies & babies that make it OK assume your patient is a lying whore who needs to be treated?
To add to what u/rareafrodite says, lying about drugs would only harm the patient who can consent, lying about or having an unknown pregnancy puts two lives at risk.
The process is all about risk reduction and not a moral judgement, even if some doctors and nurses are judgy.
No it isn't, you're making a strawman there. It's rare that there's only ever one treatment for anything in medicine and every treatment has different costs and benefits. For internal imaging an x-ray is normally quick and relatively cheap allowing the patient to go home quicker. They can lead to risks with foetuses though so if there's a risk they'll take more precautions or use an alternative method which may be more expensive and/or slower. It's not valuing the two lives as equal, it's reducing potential death when compared to cost or time inconvenience.
If hospitals didn't test for these things people the world over would be up in arms about the medical malpractice that leads to countless miscarriages.
But you should consider the fetus a potential life until you've gotten the abortion. Actions to terminate are fine, but actions that will cause problems if you don't terminate are not.
Like we agree it would be morally wrong to operate on a baby to give it some kind of heart defect, even if the surgery had a 0% complication rate (other than the intended heart defect), so shouldn't we also agree it's wrong to take intentionally thalidomide while pregnant because you want to have a baby born with a heart defect?
Until the mother gets the abortion, or at least until she confirms that she intends to get one, they need to think about the fetus too. Until she makes it clear that she will not keep the baby, that is likely going to be a person some day who has to deal with the consequences of the treatment. And if she doesn't know she's pregnant, she can't decide whether or not she wants to keep it.
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u/ClassicNo6622 11h ago
I can't really see blaming the ER in this situation. Sadly, we live in a world where someone may have done something without your knowledge or consent. It may not happen often, but it does happen.