Stark wrote:Air travel when pregnant isn't recommended anyway. I guess they really wanted to get one last holiday in.
Geez, guys, that almost comes across like you think pregnant women should be under house arrest...Thanas wrote:Yeah, agreed. Why take that unnecessary risk?
No, air travel isn't recommended but it's far from forbidden. Really, it needs to be evaluated on a woman-by-woman basis.
Why take unnecessary risk? Well, why leave the house at all?
That said - if she had had so much trouble getting pregnant in the first place I do have to wonder why they did decide to take that long a trip. Canada to Australia or vice versa is how many hours? Risks of things like DVT go up substantially the longer the flight, and pregnant women are at higher than average risk. Add in "difficulty getting pregnant" and you have to wonder if there were some issues with her staying pregnant at all. In which case you have to wonder why this particular woman decided to take a plane trip that would be at least, what, 10-12 hours on a plane each way?
One of my sisters flew for business reasons into her 8th month of pregnancy, but only with her doctor's OK, the flights were under two hours each way, and if she HAD had a medical emergency the entire route was over land and thus an emergency landing and medical aid would have been possible to obtain relatively quickly compared to a flight mostly over the Pacific Ocean for the better part of a day. Couldn't they have gone to, say, New Zealand instead of halfway around the world?
Anyhow - for whatever reason they went to Canada. It's a risk, but for most pregnant women it's probably not excessive and most of the time nothing bad happens. They didn't read the fine print on the insurance policy, even though the woman for whatever reason had had problems in the past regarding either getting pregnant or staying pregnant. This is yet another example that the insurance company is NOT your friend. They exist to make money, not to pay out a claim (though obviously they do pay when they absolutely have to do so).
I'm old enough to remember when a baby was born that early/small he or she just died, there was no option to keep the kid alive. Likewise, I remember when "assisted reproduction" beyond a syringe of sperm from a donor was pure science fiction. The upside of medical tech these days is that people get to live when a generation ago they either would have died quickly or simply never existed. The downside is that it can be goddamn fucking expensive.