Salt Lake City
A Utah woman was charged with murder this week after refusing to deliver her twins by cesarean section. One of them, a boy, died before birth. The woman, Melissa Rowland, was also charged with child endangerment, because the surviving baby, a girl, had cocaine and alcohol in her system. Doctors told police they’d urged Rowland to have a C-section, but that she’d said she would rather “lose one of the babies than be cut like that.” Rowland denied refusing the operation, and said doctors told her that the twins were fine. The Deseret News, a Utah newspaper, reported that Rowland called a California couple from jail, offering to give them a baby boy if they paid her $5,000 bail.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Book reviews: ‘Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America’ and ‘How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998’Feature A political ‘witch hunt’ and Helen Garner’s journal entries
-
The backlash against ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli filterThe Explainer The studio's charming style has become part of a nebulous social media trend
-
Why are student loan borrowers falling behind on payments?Today's Big Question Delinquencies surge as the Trump administration upends the program
