At least it wasn’t the Schuylkill
A Blue Bell woman gave birth to a baby girl yesterday in a Toyota on the Vine Street Expressway. They couple was one their way to Jefferson Hospital, and decided that they weren’t going to make it, so they pulled over and flagged down a police car. Too bad they didn’t just get off the expressway and head over to Hahnemann Hospital, which was no more than four blocks from where they were stopped. I guess if you can’t get to Jefferson, the Expressway is a better second choice than a nearby HOSPITAL.
My personal favorite part of the Inquirer story is the subtitle. “Second baby arrives much faster than first, couple discover.” Really?
Emergency delivery in car on Vine Street Expressway [Inquirer]
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That seems really insensitive. If a baby pops out of you, you can’t really hold it back like a poop or something. You don’t *decide* when to give birth. Did they “just decide” to not make it, or was it a matter of, the baby would like to leave the birth canal… now.
Well, I think Marisa’s initial point was not that the birth could somehow have been “held” until reaching Jefferson, but that, since birth was imminent, it might have been prudent to be driving towards the nearest hospital, instead of the one that was some goodly distance further away.
For my own part, I couldn’t help wondering if there was some clause in the couple’s health insurance that led them to believe Jefferson was the only viable option. I know that there will be hell to pay with my own insurer if I ever have the poor fortune to be seriously injured anywhere other than Graduate…
Well, you tend to deliver where your ob/gyn is. With all the different hospital networks in the city, not all doctors have privelages at all hospitals so there is a pretty good chance that the couple could only have the baby with their doctor at one or two other places in the city…and Hahnemann probaly isn’t one of them.
All I intended to imply was that when they realized it was an emergency, that heading for the very nearest emergency room might have been a good option.
I was going to make a comment about Philly’s traffic problems, but then I read the article and it sounds like they weren’t caught in traffic at all — this baby was just hella fast (her labor lasted 20 minutes!).
But yeah, it beats the Schuylkill. That baby would wear that legacy around her/him like a curse.