A pregnant woman, Izabela Sajbor, 30-years-old, died last year, and now prosecutors in southern Poland have charged three doctors for her death.
The spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office in Katowice, Poland, said the doctors’ actions, and lack of action, caused Izabela to die.
Two of the physicians were charged with causing her death unintentionally. They could get up to five years in prison.
Izabela came to the hospital because of the premature rupture of her membranes. Her fetus died, and Isabel died due to septic shock in September. She was in her 22nd week of pregnancy.
“I hope I won’t get sepsis because then I won’t leave this place,” the 30-year-old texted to her mom, 12 hours before she died.
Izabela had been informed weeks earlier that her unborn child had a genetic disorder – Edwards’ Syndrome. Most fetuses do not make it to term with this condition.
Poland has a restrictive anti-abortion law, and the doctors decided not to give her an abortion, even though Izabela had requested one.
Doing an abortion might have saved the mother’s life.
She was planning to leave the country to get an abortion elsewhere, but it was too late. Her water broke and she went into premature labor and ended up in the hospital and died.
The woman was the first pregnant woman to die after the law had become more restrictive. Poland allows abortions only in three situations – rape or incest, a woman’s life and health is at risk, or the fetus has a congenital abnormality. The conservative party in Poland voted last year to remove congenital defects from the list.
In response to her death, citizens protested against the abortion law and criticized the conservative stance against abortion in the predominantly Roman-Catholic country.
Some expressed the opinion that the woman’s death was not caused by factors relating to the abortion law, but to malpractice by the doctors.
But the Polish health minister said that the abortion law restrictions could have contributed to the doctors’ plan of care, making them afraid to give treatment that could have saved her life. Even though the condition of fetal abnormality had been removed from the allowed reasons for an abortion, danger to the mother’s life should have been the physicians’ concern.
A husband and child are mourning the death of a wife and mother.