This is a translation of an article from Genethique.org:
A Court in Belley, France, will decide today whether a driver is guilty of homicide of an unborn child.
On July 23, 2004, Valérie Dewier, 7 months pregnant, and her husband Jean-Charles were in a car accident. The couple had sought five years worth of medical treatment to finally conceive their baby, whom they had already named Naomie. They called her the "last chance" child. For each of their other two children, the couple had had many medical treatments to conceive.
After the accident, the doctors noticed that the baby was not getting enough oxygen, so they performed an emergency C-Section. But the baby did not survive. Since the baby was considered viable, his birth was attested to at the civil registry. The autopsy revealed the baby had breathed outside the womb, therefore the driver could be charged with involuntary manslaughter.
But, due to a series of cases relating to car accidents and medical errors, a court decision in 2001 reversed the general practice, current since the nineteenth century, of condemning people who provoked involuntary labour and the subsequent death of an unborn child. It's called the Grosmangin decision (l'arrêt Grosmangin). The MNA from Gironde, Jean-Paul Garraud, says "with this jurisprudence, we come to the paradox that an unborn animal in France is protected from crime, while the unborn human is not".
This MNA proposed a law in 2003 to fill these legal void. Quickly, he is accused of wanting to erode abortion rights, even those the intention of this law was to protect against external assault a pregnant woman who wished to keep the baby.
The MNA explains that according to the Academie de Médicine, the fetus is considered a patient. This legal immunity undermines the Hippocratic Oath. As for the Dewiers, they've lobbied politically so this legal void be filled, but they've decided to begin an association to make sure this does not happen to any other parents.
Naomie's autopsy, late in coming, revealed that she had breathed after the C-section because the the lungs were stretched.
This report was only the beginning of relief for these parents. Says Jean-Charles " I cannot believe that our child would not have existed if he hadn't breathed."
"To obtain a loan or a birth bonus, he is considered a person. But we deny his existence if he dies after an accident." says Valerie.
Tomorrow, May 19th, the St. Vincent de Paul Hospital will hold a debate on the legal status of the fetus.
A week after an investigation into the discovery of 450 unborn children in hospital's morgue was shelved, Jean-Phillipe LeGros, a psychologist who specializes in maternity, angrily said "this decision reflects society's denial in the face of the very existence of these children, to the chagrine of the families, to whom we say symbolically 'nothing happened'. He wants a debate on the reasoning behind the non-status of the fetus.
http://www.genethique.org/revues/revues/2006/mai/20060518.1.asp
