frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section

https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-hearing-c-section
28•Jimmc414•2h ago

Comments

SilverElfin•1h ago
WTF? This is shameful. It’s also why I feel vaccine mandates shouldn’t be legal. We all have a fundamental right to our bodies. The government shouldn’t be able to force you to make different choices when it comes to your body.
jacquesm•53m ago
Yes, that's precisely the thing I'm struggling with because I think vaccine mandates should be legal: it's everybody's lives at stake. But I recognize the conflict and the inconsistency.
Sabinus•52m ago
Vaccine mandates agent quite comparable to a court ordered C-section. The vaccine mandates were about employment, the State didn't force injections or send anyone to jail for not getting vaccinated. The government even had the power to fine people and didn't use it

Your continued employment as a healthcare worker, government worker or contractor, could be made conditional on vaccination status, though.

Hammershaft•51m ago
I agree it's disturbing and sad.

Vaccine mandates are more difficult. If this mother's freedom wasn't violated then she would only risk herself and her baby. If somebody doesn't take a vaccine they place risk on many other people (mostly children) who can't be vaccinated by weakening herd immunity.

dede2026•45m ago
Vaccines are a social responsibility like paying taxes. If you don't want vaccines, then go off-grid and stop free loading on our infrastructure and society.
mjevans•43m ago
I disagree. The government SHOULD be able to force people to do things to be up to standard for the good of society. Attending a basic level of public education? Maintenance of hygiene? REASONABLE actions to prevent the spread of diseases? I believe a vaccine which has been scientifically proven to have a lower risk of death than the disease it prevents qualifies as such.

Contrast the above with a case of two lives in one package. An independently functional mother and an as yet unborn child. Is it reasonable to allow the mother to risk their own life (and endanger the linked child's life) in pursuit of some belief when that risk does not spread to others? That is a very different question than one which has an impact on risk to society as a whole.

I will say, if you support enforcing a particular outcome against 'parents rights' in this case, you had better also be for more state intervention and standards upkeep with respect to ensuring that child has sufficient resources and support to become a functioning member of society. If you're willing to go that far, then I can support the logical stance of extending said support even to the point of forcing the child out of their mother against the only individual who could consent or deny consent for that effort.

jacquesm•54m ago
I read the whole thing an hour ago and I'm still not through processing all of the pros and the cons but the thing that really stands out for me is the degradation and the lack of humanity. A hospital taking a patient to court is on a level that I can not square with the Hippocratic Oath.

During COVID there were all these people talking about 'bodily autonomy' and I felt that was overblown, vaccines are one of the best things that have happened to humanity and the only reason that a very large number of inevitably fatal or grievously harming diseases have come under control and are no longer a cause for infant mortality or lifelong paralysis.

But this is on another level, very personal and immediate and I find I can't shift my perspective to the 'common good' one here. A hospital performing surgery on you that you explicitly say you do not want and then forcing you by putting you in court through 'zoom' is such a mis-application of technology that I wonder if they remember why they are there in the first place. This does not feel like care to me.

I've been in hospital a couple of times in my life and I never had the idea that that machine that was taking care of me could turn against me. But this poor woman will most likely never want to see the inside of a hospital again.

CJefferson•51m ago
Part of the problem is the courts. There are many laws now about protecting babies, in this case of they'd done nothing and mother and baby both died, they could be arrested for that.
jacquesm•40m ago
Medical consent is a house that I consider holy but I draw the line at 'societal good'. This woman was at worst a risk to herself and the degree of violation here (besides the insults!) is revolting at so many levels. They had zero respect or consideration for her, their paper reality appears to have been more important to them than the flesh and blood human that trusted them enough to put herself in their power. And then they proceeded to grossly violate that trust. This is 'Terry Schiavo' in reverse, another case that had me wondering why people don't have respect for other people and allow them some dignity. There the courts were required to allow the hospital to stop a treatment they knew would never result in a patient recovering or even improving, and yet the parents tried to use the courts to force the hospital to continue to keep her alive against the wishes of the husband and the hospital.

And that took 15 years...

Radle•44m ago
“You’re somebody who is a bad mother, right?” Mutcherson said. “Which is a huge part of what the thought process is here. This is not what mothers do. Mothers sacrifice, including allowing somebody to cut you open.”

You Americans have completely lost it.

carefulfungi•40m ago
She was denied legal counsel - not even provided a patient advocate - and was somehow expected to represent herself while in labor - while the hospital caring for her told her she was "a bad mother" in court??
pjjpo•30m ago
I also needed to reread that paragraph a few times but it seems a law professor was commenting on the case with an expression of what the hospital could have been thinking, not that anyone actually said anything about being a bad mother.
PlunderBunny•28m ago
Please consider using the Donate link at the bottom of the article to support good, independent investigative journalism!
OutOfHere•15m ago
Perhaps we need a quantitative scoring model of whether a C-section is warranted. Obviously her "score" wasn't sufficiently high until the baby's heart rate actually dropped. In other words, a C-section shouldn't have been pushed on her until there was strong evidence, i.e. the low heart rate, and not merely suggestive evidence, to warrant it.

Ask HN: How are angels and micro-VCs managing deal flow in 2026?

1•benj_mrtn•4m ago•0 comments

Hive Agents Top OpenAI Parameter Golf Challenge

https://hive.rllm-project.com/task/parameter-golf
1•deviscold•4m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: What should I do to land a position soon?

2•kdroids•12m ago•2 comments

Show HN: A daily deduction game questioning an AI source to find the answer

https://www.play5Qs.com
1•kdubber•12m ago•1 comments

Fibonacci slop is out of control [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWJzirlCv8I
1•vinhnx•13m ago•0 comments

America's biggest problem (it's not what you think)

https://czhou.bearblog.dev/americas-biggest-problem-its-not-what-you-think/
2•czhou578•17m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Are AI mandates a good idea?

1•Solar_Flare•18m ago•0 comments

My dad vibe-coded a thermostat UI in 12 hours

https://mlich.eu/posts/my-dad-vibe-coded-a-thermostat-ui-in-12-hours/
1•jurajmlich•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Yet another Claude Code agent setup, but several noval patterns

https://github.com/notque/claude-code-toolkit
1•AndyNemmity•20m ago•0 comments

FIVE09HUB

https://five09konekte.com/
1•YungDope•23m ago•0 comments

purl: a curl-esque CLI for making HTTP requests that require payment

https://www.purl.dev/
1•bpierre•24m ago•0 comments

MacinAI Local: Building a Model-Agnostic LLM Inference Engine for Mac OS 9

https://oldapplestuff.com/blog/MacinAI-Local/
1•lampiaio•30m ago•0 comments

Keep the Tokens Flowing: Lessons from 16 Open-Source RL Libraries

https://huggingface.co/blog/async-rl-training-landscape
2•vinhnx•32m ago•0 comments

Meta is killing off the Horizon Worlds metaverse. It lost $80B

https://qz.com/meta-metaverse-mark-zuckerberg-horizon-worlds-ai
3•andygcook•38m ago•1 comments

Solve chess checkmate puzzles in the browser

https://www.chess.com/blog/Ushiyutvj/chess-problems-the-puzzle-side-of-chess-youve-never-tried-un...
2•oralstage•42m ago•0 comments

Libfuse io_uring use-after-free and NULL deref (CVE-2026-33150, CVE-2026-33179)

https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/security/advisories/GHSA-qxv7-xrc2-qmfx
4•agarwal72•48m ago•1 comments

Ozempic Is About to Go Generic for Billions of People

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/health/ozempic-wegovy-generic-india-china-canada.html
11•jmsflknr•54m ago•1 comments

Chinese Founder of Router-Maker TP-Link Seeks a Trump Gold Card

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-19/chinese-founder-of-router-maker-tp-link-seeks-...
6•LopRabbit•55m ago•0 comments

The Incredible Story of the Cartel Olympics

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/mexico-cartel-la-union-tepito/686453/
3•Anon84•58m ago•2 comments

The Middle-Class Suburbanites Who Sell Their Blood Plasma to Get By

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/business/middle-class-sell-their-plasma.html
2•rawgabbit•59m ago•0 comments

Loki: Stateful Dev/Research/SEC/Ops Agent in Your AWS Account

https://github.com/inceptionstack/loki-agent
2•royosherove•59m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Unicorn Founder Game: Can you build the next unicorn?

https://unicornfounderai.com
2•ntw3541•1h ago•0 comments

A Danish Fix for U.S. Mortgage Lock-In

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/03/a-danish-fix-for-u-s-mortgage-lock-in.html
3•paulpauper•1h ago•0 comments

The Popularity of AI Writing

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/books/shy-girl-book-ai.html
2•paulpauper•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I'm building a competitive math e-sport. The site is live (beta)

https://locusmath.org
3•fizzwizzle•1h ago•0 comments

Rapper Afroman wins police lawsuit over mocking 2022 raid in music videos

https://apnews.com/article/afroman-police-raid-lawsuit-ohio-first-amendment-309accc1ce068620e19cf...
5•cebert•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: AgentVerse – Open social network for AI agents (Mar 2026)

https://nickakre.github.io/agentverse-social/
4•nickakre•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: TranslateAPI.ai

https://translateapi.ai/
2•nadermx•1h ago•0 comments

Man Pleads Guilty to Music Streaming Fraud Aided by AI

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-pleads-guilty-music-streaming-fraud-aided...
4•nreece•1h ago•0 comments

Musk liable to Twitter shareholders in fraud lawsuit over $44B takeover

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/musk-found-liable-twitter-shareho...
5•pseudolus•1h ago•0 comments