“They need to do a tracheostomy,” said Dr. Paul Byrne, an Ohio neonatologist with nearly five decades of experience and a former president of the Catholic Medical Association. “If the baby is stable otherwise, and has a tracheostomy, then the baby can be taken care of at home.”
...But Dr. Byrne told LifeSiteNews that “there’s no case” when a child is on a ventilator where the tracheostomy wouldn’t be indicated.
...Dr. Byrne called the attempt to have the state remove Joseph’s ventilator “terrible, absolutely terrible,” and insisted that in his fifty years in neonatology he’s never removed a child’s ventilator. “I’ve never seen a time to turn off a ventilator,” he said. “If a baby has a disease process that’s so bad that they’re going to die, then they die on the ventilator anyway. So you don’t have to stop the ventilator.”
He also criticized the common phrase “life support,” saying, “Life is either there or it’s not there. You don’t have to hold up the life. What we do in medicine are actions ... that support the vital activity of respiration.”
“Assuming doctors can do something to support the vital activities, we ought to do them,” he explained. “And a tracheostomy ought to be done, and the baby ought to continue on the ventilator.”
Though doctors have said Joseph is in a “vegetative state,” Dr. Byrne called it a “made-up term” similar to the notion of “brain death,” which he said was invented “simply to get beating hearts for transplantation.”
Even Joseph’s doctor in London has admitted that the tracheostomy could prolong his life. “A tracheotomy would likely provide for a longer period of life, however, in our view would not result in improvement of well-being and could reduce quality of life,” Dr. Douglas Fraser told the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board in January.
Is this your position also? That there is no such thing as "brain death"?
As I said, a trach is NOT extraordinary care and a person can live for years with one. Some in a coma, some alert and aware. There is no reason NOT performing such a proceedure on the child. Its a crime not to do so as far as I am concerned. Don’t need a neonatologist to state anything. I have taken care of trach patients. It is considered rather minor in a hospital setting.. Done in ER’s daily across the country.