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posted by mrpg on Friday March 17 2017, @06:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the god-help-us dept.

The Associated Press reports:

Oregon's chief medical examiner said Tuesday that an infant born to members of a church that practices faith healing died from complications of prematurity as authorities conducted a criminal investigation into the child's death. The baby, Gennifer, was probably "a couple of months" premature and her lungs were too underdeveloped to allow her to breath unassisted for long, Dr. Karen Gunson, the chief medical examiner, said in a phone interview.

Clackamas County sheriff's investigators will present the case to prosecutors but have not finished interviewing witnesses, Sgt. Brian Jensen told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

She died a few hours after her birth at her grandparents' home on March 5 in Oregon City, where the Followers of Christ Church is based. Her birth was attended by three traditional midwives, family members and other church members, authorities have said. No one called 911 when the baby began to have trouble breathing, Jensen said. A deputy medical examiner responding to a call about Gennifer's death noticed the surviving twin, Evelyn, was also struggling and called law enforcement, who persuaded the parents to get her medical treatment. That baby girl is doing well in the neonatal intensive care unit at Oregon Health & Science University, Gunson said.


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  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Friday March 17 2017, @10:03AM (3 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 17 2017, @10:03AM (#480323) Journal

    This shows the primitive nature and limitations of the for-profit hyper capatilist health care system.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @10:29AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @10:29AM (#480329)

    Im not sure they would care where the money comes from, if taxes paid for the care they would want to force people to use it just as much. But let's say the premature twins were ~24 weeks old, then (assuming those numbers from wikipedia are accurate) even with the care we would only expect one to survive on average. This scenario is consistent with the info we have been provided, so claims like this are unwarranted:

    "Given the fact that her sister is doing pretty well, I suspect she probably would have done pretty well too," she said. "I can't tell you for sure whether she would have survived, but the fact is, there's a twin that is doing well."

    Is this just another example of the innumeracy that plagues medical practicioners? Or is there some other "real" reason that the medical examiner believes that? Is it a deliberate political statement? What am I missing here?

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by wisnoskij on Friday March 17 2017, @11:51AM (1 child)

      by wisnoskij (5149) <reversethis-{moc ... ksonsiwnohtanoj}> on Friday March 17 2017, @11:51AM (#480346)

      I think it is dangerous to base opinions on so little information. First off, the article states it was probably more like 8 weeks premature. And you can bet the being a twin completely changes those statistics.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @03:35PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @03:35PM (#480452)

        Where does it mention eight weeks? Also if being a twin affects the expected viability, the medical examiner should be mentioning that and using it as part of her assessment. Right now her reasoning seems too flippant for this story to even be believable.

        I think you were suggesting otherwise, but I could imagine that being twins skews the stats to be more extreme, ie one is the runt of the pair.