...................................
Current Texas law allows a physician to decide to withdraw life-sustaining treatment, including food and water, from a patient despite the patient's directive or expressed wishes. Once the physician’s decision is validated by the hospital’s ethics committee, the patient and/or family have 10 days to find a transfer to another facility. If the doctor and hospital go through this procedure, they are immune from any lawsuit involving withholding care.
~Snip~
According to a statement by Texas Right to Life, Ms. Gonzalez holds no unrealistic expectations and recognizes that Emilio is quite ill and that he is unlikely to see his second birthday. Instead she wants him to die naturally, not by a direct act of euthanasia at the hands of his doctors.
Emilio is suspected to have Leigh's disease, a disorder of the central nervous system that causes deterioration in motor skills. He is currently breathing with the help of a ventilator and is receiving nutrition through a nasogastric feeding tube.
"I know there's no cure. I know my son is going to die," said Catarina. "But I want him to die when God calls him, not when someone pulls the plug."
Texas law falls firmly on the side of the hospital. "You have control over nothing," Gonzales's attorney Jerri Ward told the press. "The hospital has total control over your body, records, and decisions."
According to the current law, passed in 1999 by then-Governor George Bush, if doctors determine that life-sustaining treatment requested by a patient's family is futile, the case is then considered by the hospital ethics committee. If the committee agrees with the doctors, the family has 10 days to find another facility and move the patient, or treatment will end. The law was the product of two years of negotiations prompted by Bush's veto of a measure that would have afforded no notice to patients and families.
~Snip~
In recent testimony before the Texas Senate, Painter played a voicemail recording (read transcript) left for one of his clients, in November 2006, from a Houston-area hospital administrator. The patient involved needed dialysis in order to live, but his family lacked the resources to pay. The administrator said that the corporate headquarters and hospital administration wanted the patient out of their hospital, because the family could not pay, and that if the family did not act, they would resort to the courts and get approval to send the patient “on to glory.”
(Spero News has confirmed the identity of the patient and hospital and the family wishes to remain anonymous.)
The patient is still alive and stable five months later.
8mm
................................
The statistics are alarming. The details of individual cases are horrific. ~Snip~
In the United States, children under age 4 are more likely to die from abuse and neglect than from any other cause, including accidents and childhood illnesses. In Massachusetts, which has the lowest number of fatalities from child maltreatment in the country, the number of child abuse and neglect cases is the third highest in the United States, according to information provided by the Massachusetts Children’s Trust Fund.
Every day, more children become statistics. In the past few weeks alone, a 3-month-old baby and a 2-year-old boy from Fitchburg were badly injured at the hands of others. The toddler suffered burns over about 50 percent of his body in March, when his 17-year-old mother’s teenage boyfriend allegedly intentionally poured steaming hot water over the child’s head. In April, police allege, the father of the 3-month-old, while under the influence of heroin, broke the child’s left arm in four places. The child also had bloody needle pricks and bruises on both feet, authorities said.
Because of the state’s high number of child maltreatment cases, and a particularly shocking 2005 case in which 11-year-old Haleigh Poutre was beaten into a coma allegedly by her adoptive parents, the state Legislature recently formed the House Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect. The committee’s report, released March 27, recommends several changes in the way the state deals with the problem.
Advocates trying to reinforce methods of child abuse prevention
8mm