Grand Junction – Even though the parents of a pregnant 17-year-old tried to get medical attention for their daughter, federal health privacy rules prevented doctors from telling them about her condition.
The parents of Cheyenne Corbett suspected she was pregnant, but she denied it and used a privacy act to prevent them from getting that information from a physician.
Corbett continued to lie about and deny her pregnancy even after she gave birth Saturday to a 6.6-lb, full-term girl in the shower of her family home. The baby was abandoned in a cabinet where she suffocated.
Corbett, a senior at Palisade High School with no criminal history, is charged as an adult with first-degree murder and child abuse resulting in death.
Dr. William Plested, president of the American Medical Association, said Thursday that such medical privacy regulations create a quandary.
“They have given some important protections, but they have brought up a lot of problems,” he said. “We’re going to continue to see issues like this. It’s a combination of medical issues and ethical issues and we have to decide whose issues are preeminent.”
Deputy 21st Judicial District prosecutor Tammy Erett told a judge Thursday that Corbett had known she was pregnant since early this year, but had lied continually to friends, family and medical personnel and spurned all offers of help.
Corbett’s attorney Gordon Gallagher told District Judge Amanda Bailey, that Corbett “is obviously grieving” and needed to deal with “some mental health issues.”
Corbett hung her head and quietly cried at the defense table.
Erett said several of Corbett’s friends had suspected she was pregnant. They took Corbett and the baby’s 18-year-old father for a test that confirmed the pregnancy, upon which the father told Corbett he didn’t want anything more to do with her.
Erett said friends pressed Corbett to tell her parents, who had already been supportive of an older sister who got pregnant out of wedlock at 18.
But Corbett’s parents were never able to confirm their daughter’s suspected pregnancy even after her adoptive father took her to a physician in Phoenix while she was visiting him there in July.
Corbett signed a form requesting that no information about her condition be revealed to her parents. Under the rules of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, commonly known as HIPAA, her request prevented the physician from telling her parents anything about her condition.
Corbett told her parents she had mistakenly signed the HIPAA form. They had filed paperwork trying to get the confidentiality reversed when Corbett gave birth.
“That is a very important issue to me now,” said Krisann Cruthers, Corbett’s mother, who said she couldn’t comment further on the advise of attorneys.
HIPAA is a voluminous and complicated set of federal privacy regulations that medical professionals say is tough to interpret. It is further complicated by differing state laws that sometimes establish another layer of privacy protections for minors.
In most states, including Arizona and Colorado, if minors ask for privacy, their parents are not privy to medical records that deal with sensitive medical conditions such as pregnancy, substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, or testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
The complex regulations have also led to differing interpretations and legal snarls that Mary Crumbaker, director of director of research and compliance at St. Mary’s Hospital, called “crazy making.”
When Corbett’s mother found her cleaning up blood Saturday morning, she still did not know about her daughter’s advanced pregnancy, Erett told the judge. Corbett said she was menstruating heavily. She then changed her story to say she was five months pregnant and had started bleeding and passed “some tissue.”
Erett said Corbett continued to deny she had given birth even after her mother took her to the hospital, where she delivered the placenta and physicians asked where her baby was.
Erett said the privacy laws had a sad outcome in Corbett’s case.
“She had a supportive family. Here they are, trying to do something, and their hands are tied. I think they did everything they could do,” Erett said. “When they deny that information what are you going to do?”
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or at nlofholm@denverpost.com.
