Hospital negligent, but its victim is indicted

Nov 25, 2002

Cutbacks in hospital staffing have caused long waits in emergency rooms. One such wait, in late October, led to the death of a newborn girl. But the hospital is not charged with second-degree murder, the mother is.

Sixteen-year-old Selena Jones, a junior at Detroit's Henry Ford High School, went to Providence Hospital with abdominal cramps. She arrived about 7:45 pm. At some point after midnight, she had not yet seen a doctor. She went into a bathroom and gave birth. Doctors found her there with the baby in the toilet, dead, having drowned.

A sixteen-year-old young woman sought help. After four hours of no help, and in who knows what state of mind, she ran out of options and her infant died. Nothing can hide the fact that this hospital was not equipped to diagnose and deal promptly with emergency situations.

It's a mark of how barbaric our legal and medical systems are, that this child-mother could be brought up on murder charges. If she had wanted to kill her baby she would not have gone to a hospital to do it!