Justice?
Melissa Rowland, the woman in Utah with mental health and chemical dependency problems--problems that have no doubt helped each other along--who was charged with murder for refusing a c-section, has entered a guilty plea for child endangerment.

"Prosecutors will recommend that Rowland receive concurrent terms of zero to five years in prison, court probation and admittance to a drug treatment program.
[SNIP]
Salt Lake County prosecutor Langdon Fisher said the plea agreement was reached based on Rowland’s 'mental health history.' Prosecutors had originally dropped the child-endangerment charge and planned to use evidence that Rowland used cocaine to bolster the murder charge."

If we acknowledge that she had a mental health history that played a part in her reckless decision(s), then why aren't we sending her to receive treatment for that? Don't they have mental health institutions in Utah? I can only assume that this plea, in light of that acknowledgement, means her mental health problems swayed prosecutors only into believing they might not win, not into caring that it was a legitimate, contributing factor toward deadly decisions. In other words, her problems were an inconvenience for them, the same unhelpful attitude that already kept her from getting the help she needed when it might have mattered to her kids. If she's sane we'll send her to jail for 20 years, but if she's not, we'll send her to jail for 5??

But another sentence at the bottom of the article especially caught my eye :

"Legal experts said they do not know of any other instance in the United States in which a woman was charged with murder for refusing or delaying a C-section, though some women have been forced to undergo C-sections after their doctors obtained court orders."

If doctors can obtain court orders for c-sections in such cases, and if it was so dire in this case (obviously it was), why didn't they do that here? What is the obligation of the hospital that let her leave?