You're reading too much into my paragraph. Remember, as I have admitted, I don't know exactly where to draw the line. Your child required a simple procedure; so did mine. Some children require more complicated procedures, and I'm OK with that too. Some don't recover 100%; that's fine too.
But I think it's important to point out that the medical community acknowledges that there is no treatment for this child's disorder that will save it's life. All cases are ultimately terminal. Furthermore, even when the full range of medical options are applied, only some children live into young childhood. I would assume that there is a range of severities in this disorder, so it is not inconceivable that the doctors in this case have concluded that they have done all they can.
Seriously now, if the doctors honestly believe they can do absolutely nothing to correct or even alleviate the disorder, so that all they can do now is continue artificial breathing support until even that fails, what is to be done? Now before you say "what, and let the child suffocate", please understand that that is eventually exactly what is going to happen to that child. It's lungs are unable to keep up with the child's growing body. So it will suffocate now, or suffocate later.
How do you define "significant artifical life support?" Would artificial feeding methods fall under that category?
In my opinion, no. For the record I was firmly in Terry Schiavo's corner in her case.
How do you know that the child is having significant physical suffering? Should we kill everyone who is having "significant physical suffering" who can't be permanently relieved of that suffering? Where do we draw the line?
Well, look, we all have to take the word of the articles we read on this. None of us are there. But you're doing yourself a disservice if you trust only this one news article. It is obviously slanted; so go check out others and see if you can get a fuller picture.
Again, I don't know where to draw the line. But what we have here is a child who is terminally ill, who requires artificial support just to breathe. The doctors are claiming that the child is suffering; someone else here said that they have sedated the child to spare him the pain. Other information I have read suggests that even this life support will ultimately fail. I honestly think that this is comfortably on the side of the line that says the merciful thing is not to continue artificial life support.
" Texas Children's Hospital is an internationally recognized full-care pediatric hospital located in the Texas Medical Center in Houston. The largest pediatric hospital in the United States, Texas Children's Hospital is dedicated to providing the finest possible pediatric patient care, education and research.
Texas Children's is nationally ranked in the top four among children’s hospitals by both Child magazine and U.S. News & World Report. The hospital has garnered widespread recognition for its expertise and breakthrough developments in the treatment of cancer, diabetes, asthma, HIV, premature babies, and cardiogenic and attention-related disorders. Watch a video to learn more about how Texas Children's is changing the face of health care, one child at a time. Texas Children’s is affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine and is its primary pediatric training site. Baylor professors also are the service chiefs and staff physicians of Texas Children's more than 40 patient care centers. For two consecutive years, the pediatric-research collaboration between Baylor and Texas Children's has taken the No. 1 spot in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health.
The hospital's award-winning medical staff consists of more than 1,580 board-certified, primary-care physicians, pediatric subspecialists, pediatric surgical subspecialists and dentists. In addition, Texas Children's offers a dedicated, highly skilled nursing and support staff of more than 6,000."
They did not decide to cut this child off for no reason or without consulting the parent. They did not do it without extensive consultation with medical specialists and ethicists. Those are their standard procedures.
This story has been slanted to make it as much a sob story as possible.
So9