Yikes! I’ve never heard of such a thing. How could a baby’s abdomen be bigger that it’s head?
And only 28 weeks too. Something wrong with this picture.
It isn't... but the head is made to compress in the birth canal (which is why a newborn has a soft spot in the middle of her skull); sometimes the baby's shoulders are too broad and get stuck.
In some cases, the Obstetrician will even go so far as to try to break the baby's collarbone so that the shoulders will pass through the birth canal. This happened when my younger sister was born in the mid-1980s. She was a 10+ pound baby and arrived too quickly to permit a Caesarian... the OB couldn't break her collarbone, which resulted in the OB pulling at my sister's head and other nurses assisting my mother to push. The doctors almost lost both my mother and my sister -- but our story was a happy one. Both ended up perfectly fine and healthy.
That makes me think that this doctor's maneuver isn't entirely out-of-the-ordinary, though other decisions he made along the way seem to make him liable, and the result was utterly tragic.
That’s what I was thinking as well. If true, it sounds like the baby had some serious problems. Why would any doctor in his right mind push for a vaginal delivery if what is being claimed it true? Why wasn’t their doc, Susan Moore able to perform the delivery? Did she not have privileges at this hospital? Was she unavailable? Did Dr. Webb not have access to her medical records, could he have not tried to reach Dr. More or performed and ultra sound? Was this labor already too far gone, with the baby’s head too far down the birth canal to perform a normal c-section. There are a lot of unanswered questions here.
I believe they said there was some kind of mass (tumor or something) on the baby’s abdomen. Still, at 28 weeks, that must have been some huge mass.