Rachel Nyirahabiyambere with two of her grandchildren in 2008.
Posted on 03/10/2011 12:13:39 PM PST by wagglebee
Rachel Nyirahabiyambere with two of her grandchildren in 2008.
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Rwandan immigrant who survived the genocide of 1994 has now had her life cut off by starvation and dehydration, reportedly because a U.S. hospital affiliated with Georgetown University decided that caring for the woman who lost her health insurance was too expensive.
The New York Times reports that Rachel Nyirahabiyambere, a 58-year-old grandmother and refugee from war-torn Rwanda, has been denied food and water since Feb. 19 after her feeding tube was removed.
“It’s all about money,” son Jerome Ndayishimiye, 33, told the Times.
“Now we are powerless spectators, just watching our mother die,” he said. “In our culture, we would never sentence a person to die from hunger.”
Unlike the Terri Schiavo case, every one of Nyirahabiyambere’s family members has been pleading for her right to live. Since last April, Nyirahabiyambere had been severely disabled after suffering a stroke. For eight months, she had been under the care of Georgetown University Hospital, a non-profit entity run by the MedStar Health Corporation and affiliated with the eponymous Catholic university.
But the Times reports that the hospital, frustrated by the woman’s lack of insurance and inability to pay her medical bills, sought a court in Alexandria, Virginia to appoint a guardian for Nyirahabiyambere who would take the grandmother off their hands, on the basis that the family would not make a decision.
The Times reports that Nyirahabiyambere’s sons – immigrants who fled the violence in Rwanda and earned their way from menial jobs to master’s degrees – lost control of their mother’s situation when Judge Nolan B. Dawkins of Alexandria Circuit Court appointed attorney Andrea Sloan as her guardian, despite an apparent conflict of interest: Sloan was the guardian recommended by the attorney for Georgetown University Hospital, even though the family had asked for an independent attorney to represent their mother’s interests.
The Times reports that Sloan then transferred the mother to a nursing home in Millersville, Maryland. The hospital then agreed to pay the costs of nursing home care – but the financial burden assumed by Georgetown University Hospital in that situation was also shortlived. Sloan made arrangements to put Nyirahabiyambere in hospice care and have her feeding tube withdrawn, leaving her to starve to death.
Sloan explained to the Times that the family did not have a right to consume hospital resources that might be allocated to others with better chances of recovery.
“Hospitals cannot afford to allow families the time to work through their grieving process by allowing the relatives to remain hospitalized until the family reaches the acceptance stage, if that ever happens,” Andrea Sloan told the Times in an e-mail. “Generically speaking, what gives any one family or person the right to control so many scarce health care resources in a situation where the prognosis is poor, and to the detriment of others who may actually benefit from them?”
The Times reports that one of Nyirahabiyambere sons protested in a letter to Sloan that “Ending someone’s life by hunger is morally wrong and unrecognized in the culture of the people of Rwanda.”
Sloan, however, responded that she was trying to understand “your culture” and asked flippantly, “Feeding tubes are not part of your culture, are they?”
She said that unless they could prove their mother would like to live “with a feeding tube, in diapers, with no communication with anyone and in a nursing home” that she would not reinstate the feeding tube.
The Times notes that Nyirahabiyambere, the wife of a Baptist minister, came to the United States after surviving the horrors of the Rwandan genocide and violence in refugee camps that divided her family, made her a widow, and forced her to survive in the jungle for a time. Her sons, who became U.S. citizens, brought her to America, where she found work that gave her health care benefits.
Nyirahabiyambere, however, lost her health insurance because she left her job to follow her oldest son to Virginia and help take care of his grandchildren. Generally, U.S. health insurance is employer-based, and not portable for an individual that switches jobs.
Georgetown University Hospital, which says on its website that they provide “physicial and spiritual comfort to patients and families in the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis – care of the person,” declined to tell the Times why they had washed their hands of Nyirahabiyambere’s case and omitted to intervene in Sloan’s course of action.
LifeSiteNews.com contacted the Maryland nursing home Wednesday where Nyirahabiyambere resided, but a spokeswoman said no one would be able to talk about her case, or even confirm if she were alive or dead.
Bobby Schinder of the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network told LSN that he was trying to establish contact with the family, but admitted that at this late stage there might be little that could be done.
“In our culture, we would never sentence a person to die from hunger.”
A good reason to go back to the morally superior culture of Rwanda.
I would have taken her home. With training, I managed my mother’s feeding tube for 3 1/2 months.
Let's see, Rwanda had a civil war and genocide where approximately 1 million people were killed. This woman and her family left, moved to the United States and became citizens.
Here in the United States a baby is killed EVERY 24 SECONDS, we dehydrate and starve the disabled to death and we will soon have death panels.
53 MILLION INNOCENT AMERICANS have been murdered as the result of judicial decree in the past 38 years -- if you think you can make a case based on that for "moral superiority," be my guest.
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What hypocrisy.
It’s such a lie. These helpless, defenceless souls are being tortured to death. At least have the human decency to admit that what you are doing is killing them.
No - The point of this article is to pull-on our heart strings and blame others.
I notice Mrs. Nyirahabiyambere has a son, has a daughter, has grand-children. Its good to have family. Are they supporting their mother? Is life really so much better in Rwanda as they claim? Why blame Georgetown Univ. Hospital? They seem to have been extremely charitable and respectful in the many months they cared for this poor woman. So who then must protect life? Shall we only look for those with the deepest pockets to do so? I feel this article does not offer solutions, only emotion.
By that I mean you support the idea that a hospital can just decide to starve and dehydrate someone to death?
Good. You go pay for her healthcare or let the Baptist minister.
Hello??? Did you read the article? The hospital petitioned the court to appoint a legal guardian for this woman. That removed any control the family had over this woman’s care. Just like Terri Schiavo, whose family wanted to care for her at home at their own expense. The article’s point is that the gov has no right to decide who lives & who dies. Don’t you get that?
Wow! The cold-hearted, anti-life responses by some FReepers are unbelievable & are what give conservatives a bad name.
I will pray for you.....some of you seem to be under the influence of the Evil One.
Cut off her feeding tube and water? Gee, that’s what we do with people here in the US. It’s the ObamaCareWay. She should have been warned after watching Terri Schiavo MURDERED.
First — it appears we don’t have ALL the pieces of this puzzle to put together. All we DO know is a woman is DYING and SOMEWHERE, SOMEONE has dropped to ball.
Second, if this is a failure of Georgetown Hospital, a “Jesuit” Hospital, are they “washing their hands” of her care because she is an immigrant — or because she is a Baptist? Yeah — the Jesuits have a history....
Third, it appears that the Government HAS intervened, so it may not matter WHAT the Hospital does or does not want to do. If the Government SAYS who can or cannot make decisions, or what can or cannot be done insofar as treatment, then the Hospitals hands are tied. The patient DOESN’T matter.
It's threads like these that show me how many FReepers actually support death panels.
Of course not.. In Rwanda their culture would be to HACK them to death!!!
Murder is murder. No matter the country or the method. It's true the world is immersed in a culture of death. It's just hard to believe America has to be part of that culture. We should be better than that. If more people actually believed in God (instead of just saying they do), we could possibly turn America around.
bump!
Usually people read the article, and THEN post.
The article, though, doesn't do a good job of making the issues clear. The central issue is not
The real, central point is that a helpless woman's feeding tube was removed, for the purpose of causing her death by starvation/dehydration. This is murder.
Since she was severely disabled, the proper thing to do would have been to secure "ordinary care" for her -- at a long-term convalescent care center or hospice --- which her adult sons, all apparently employed and enjoying some level of income, should have paid for.
"Ordinary care" is nothing more or less than nutrition/hydration, hygienic maintenance and comfort care; it is not expensive; and it should have been provided by her next of kin. This is their familial obligation. If they can't afford a convaescent home, it could have been provided in a private home, or even an apartment, with home hospice workers and/or family members attending to the (simple) process of tube feeding.
The fact that all the choices were taken away by a court-appointed "guardian" who exercised "guardianship" by arranging for her death by starvation, is gravely wrong. Whatever the legalities, from a moral point of view it is premeditated murder.
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