Posted on 03/16/2005 6:12:01 AM PST by Crackingham
The baby wore a cute blue outfit with a teddy bear covering his bottom. The 17-pound, nearly 6-month-old boy wiggled with eyes open, his mother said, and smacked his lips. Then at 2 p.m. Tuesday, a medical staffer at Texas Children's Hospital gently removed the breathing tube that had kept Sun Hudson alive since his birth Sept. 25. Cradled by his mother, he took a few breaths, and died.
"I talked to him, I told him that I loved him. Inside of me, my son is still alive," Wanda Hudson told reporters afterward. "This hospital was considered a miracle hospital. When it came to my son, they gave up in six months. ... They made a terrible mistake."
Sun's death marks the first time a U.S. judge has allowed a hospital to discontinue an infant's life-sustaining care against a parent's wishes, according to bioethical experts. A similar case involving a 68-year-old man in a vegetative state at another Houston hospital is before a court now.
"It's sad this thing dragged on for so long. We all feel it's unfair, that a child doesn't have a chance to develop and thrive," said William Winslade, a bioethicist and lawyer who is a professor at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Paraphrasing the late Catholic theologian and ethicist Richard McCormick, Winslade added, "This isn't murder. It's mercy, and it's appropriate to be merciful in that way. It's not killing, it's stopping pointless treatment."
The hospital's description of Sun — that he was motionless and sedated for comfort — has differed sharply from the mother's. Since February, the hospital has blocked the media from Hudson's invitation to see the baby, citing privacy concerns.
"I wanted y'all to see my son for yourself," Hudson told reporters. "So you could see he was actually moving around. He was conscious."
On Feb. 16, Harris County Probate Court Judge William C. McCulloch made the landmark decision to lift restrictions preventing Texas Children's from discontinuing care. However, an appeal by Hudson's attorney, Mario Caballero, and a procedural error on McCulloch's part prevented the hospital from acting for four weeks.
Texas law allows hospitals to discontinue life-sustaining care, even if a patient's family members disagree. A doctor's recommendation must be approved by a hospital's ethics committee, and the family must be given 10 days from written notice of the decision to try and locate another facility for the patient.
I don't have any questions, but I do have a statement: you don't have all the facts.
Muleteam1
I smell a TROLL.
The baby was not really a baby. This was not life in any way you could define it.
Thanks for the link.
What a heartwrenching situation. Sounds like it was not totally open-and-shut; sounds like the mother's a whack-job — but when it comes to one's children in a situation like this, I'm not inclined to be too harsh.
One of the very most terrified moments in my life was when we had to rush my then-baby to a hospital via ambulance, as he was choking and coughing up blood. I likely lost a decade in that first hour or two. (Thank GOD it turned out okay.)
Dan
BTW, it was about money in a sense; she gets a check as long as the baby is in the hospital.
To buy her drugs.
"The resources required to keep this baby alive could have kept hundreds alive somewhere else. Choices are always tough when it comes to these issues. We live in a world of limited resources and rationing is a fact of life."
So now we play god and ration life away?
SICK!
Just for the sake of discussion, why don't we define "life".
Whether or not the child should have been allowed to die--and there are thoughtful people of goodwill on both sides of the issue--that post is completely false.
This was a baby. Very much alive. As human as you or I.
Life means that at some point in your "life" you would be able to function on SOME level without a machine doing everything for you.
That was not the case in this situation.
I wonder if they harvested the heart or eyes, etc..?
In the event the health care was not paid up-to-date, I wonder if the hospital had forms for the mother to approve that allowed the baby...er, life as you describe, to serve as a donor?
Or, with the defective organs (lungs, etc) did that make him ineligible?
No it wasn't; it wasn't EVER going to function as a even near normal person.
From where?
Yes, HE was. He was a human being by every plausible definition.
And so it begins, judges are now officially gods having the power of life and death, over the innocent. Looks like Hitler won the morality war after all.
Get lost "newbie".
I wouldn't imagine they could have; all his organs were way too small -- I think I read some type of dwarfism is involved -- to support a growing, thriving body; if I recall correctly, that was the problem: the organs were so small that eventually the baby would have "smothered" in a sense.
Most children born with this problem die shortly after birth or in utero.
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