Summary: There are very real ethical and moral issues in spaying pregnant cats at shelters. Are there policies in place to deal with this situation? When a pregnancy is near full-term the kittens are viable and they should be treated as individuals. If they are to be euthanised they should be euthanise properly and painlessly. The uterus containing the kittens should not simply be thrown away because the unborn kittens will suffocate to death which would be against the veterinarian’s oath.
This is a complicated subject. I’m not sure that I am qualified to discuss it but I believe that it needs discussing. There are tough ethical issues. What if a veterinarian working for a shelter sets out to spay a female cat who is pregnant and the pregnancy is near the full-term so that the kittens are viable by which I mean that they would live if delivered. What does the veterinarian do under these circumstances?
Does a veterinarian carry on spaying the cat, throwaway the uterus with the kittens inside into a bin and then move onto the next cat? If he/she did that the kittens would die of suffocation.
Would that be a breach of her oath as a veterinarian? Would it be ethically and morally wrong to do that? Even when taking into account that there are too many unwanted cats and the purpose of the veterinarian is to prevent more unwanted cats coming into the world it still seems wrong.
Or does she stop the spaying operation and deliver the kittens by a caesarean section and then euthanise each individual kitten in the usual way? Or does the vet allow the kittens to be nursed by the mother and then seek adopters for the kittens?
I would be interested to hear from people who work in animal and cat shelters who may be able to tell me if there is a policy on dealing with these situations and if the policy is rigorously complied with.
The well-known advocate of no kill cat shelters, Nathan Winograd, writes in his blog:
“When we spay pregnant animals and the unborn kittens and puppies die, the fact that they are not yet born does not relieve our responsibility toward assuring their right to live. When we abort kittens and puppies, we are literally killing puppies and kittens.
If the kittens or puppies are viable, they must be individually killed, usually through an injection of sodium pentobarbital. Even when they are not, however, when a mother is spayed, the kittens or puppies die from anoxia (oxygen deprivation) due to lack of blood supply from the uterus once the vessels are clamped. They suffocate.”
I think the question of abortion of kittens and the spaying of pregnant mothers presents a whole range of ethical issues and policy decisions. It would seem to me that if a veterinarian was acting to a high ethical level he or she should know before spaying the cat whether the cat is pregnant or not and if pregnant know for how long she has been pregnant to be able to determine whether the kittens she is carrying are viable.
If they are viable then they should be dealt with as individuals and if that means euthanasia and so be it. Euthanasia of unborn kittens does not mean suffocating them. This would be in breach of the veterinarian’s oath.
P.S. In the US, vets are in breach of their oath millions of times each year when they declaw cats for non-therapeutic purposes i.e. for the convenience of the owner. Perhaps they don’t give a damn if they are in breach of their damned oath. It is meaningless.
I agree e with all of the above since I do TNR and rescue. I consistently have kittens dumped on me…. once a mother and 6 eight week old kittens. Irresponsibility is the moral issue underlying it all. ANYONE whose cat breeds, by mistake or not, needs to spay and neuter ever kitten before finding it a home. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.
To answer your question please find a high kill shelter that is stacked floor to ceiling with kittens that were born and will shortly be used as the stuffing for garbage bags.
I had planned to spay Tera but she was far enough along it hit my moral button. When I made the decision to let the kits be born I then became morally, legally and financially responsible for their well being. 4 of the babies were humanely euthanized due to birth defects and other complications. Tera is now in her own forever home and we kept the two surviving kits and they are our babies. Thus my moral judgment was valid since I took responsibility. So if the mother cat being spayed with a bellyful who is then going to ensure that each and every one of them has a life worth living ?
ME, you have hit the nail on the head with respect to the dilemma. I guess sometimes morality is inconvenient.
It is. Sometimes it’s impossible. Almost without fail the rescue or persons taking care of these cats are not the ones who violated the moral code and tossed out house pets or failed/refused to follow commonsense and S/N. They have tossed their lack of morals onto innocent bystanders. Many of the cats in TNR and shelters are kittens themselves whose health would be better preserved terminating their pregnancy.
Throwing this moral dilemma on the shelters and rescues is like yelling at the person with one lifeboat for not saving everyone on the Titanic.