I was there, in the Lieutenant Governor’s office and in other meetings of interested parties for the last 2 years.
Odd, this article doesn’t say anything about the bills that included expanded time between the initiation of the process and after the ethics committee decision - about a month all told. Where’s the mention of the wording that would have prevented food and water from being a medical treatment - offered as an unexpected compromise by people who had opposed the same in the past. There’s no mention the only time any one has ever pulled the “plug” in the 10 days’ time was when there was no next of kin or no objection from the kin.
TRTL is demanding that the law be changed to “treatment until transfer.” The lawyers involved seem most bothered by the legal protections in the Texas Advance Directive Act and pushed a Bill that deliberately removed legal protection that is in the current law - which also protects me if I refuse to “pull the plug.”
While the lawyers would like to be able to sue the doctors, the real goal is to make sure that *I* and doctors like me are forced to indefinitely violate our consciences.
They would change the law to force me to write orders causing numbers of other people to do what I know is wrong - have me learn to follow orders and go against my conscience and medical judgment - first, here and in abortions, etc. - then when the State needs to cut money or when there’s not enough ventilators or vaccines.
And *that* is why the ACLU joined them.
The next “big” bioethics and public health ethics theme is rationing of care and determining who gets care in times of epidemics and other shortages. The goal is to remove the physician’s medical judgment and conscience in order to give the powers that be (PTB) the right to pick and choose. Next, we’ll hear about necessary regulations or statute to enable bean counters or lawmakers to force docs to act by the “consensus.”
There comes a time when what I have to offer can’t heal, and is known to cause cells and tissues to be injured in a person who is dying and who would already be dead if I hadn’t been interfering. The most obvious example is when a family insists on CPR for a person with ribs brittle from age.
In the case of the little boy mentioned in this article, the ventilator pressures were injuring the lungs. The baby’s lungs had “leaks” or collapsed several times.
They say that I am not to be trusted to determine when the technology and medications that I have to offer are causing harm without hope for healing - that I can’t say when more cells are dying due to my treatments than are helped to continue to live and divide and function.
And yet, they want to force me to determine how much potassium to put in the IV and how high to set the pressures on the ventilator, to put in new IV’s when the old one fail or become infected - or surgically implant more permanent tubes and devices. And to do it indefinitely - except when the PTB say I shouldn’t, of course.
Does this make sense?
I for one think doctors should be making the calls. With maybe an administrative committee of medical educated people to look at rare suspicious cases.
I don’t really get the alleged right to life position of keeping on operating and doing invasive surgeries in a futile effort. That may give a few days or maybe a few days of ‘life’ more at most, but vastly more suffering. We wouldn’t do that with animals who are dying, we let them go out as painfree as possible.