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.
By all means, let one of her sons, with masters degrees, take their mother home and care for her or pay for her care at the hospital.
I am sure the hospital would be fine with that.
There is no moral high ground to say someone else, like the hospital or taxpayers, must pay for her care.
Evidently not the rwanda custom. Taking care of ones own that is.
and what do you know of this story outside of one article?
You’re welcome. Thank you for reading it.
Another article:
After reading the articles, the only lesson I can really come up with (well, I can come up with others, but they’re very wordy) is that families have to take more responsibility for their aged or ailing familiy members, and this may indeed involve personal or family hardship, hard work or financial cost.
It’s going to have to happen. People need to care more for their own. With so many broken families, unwed mothers, and so on, this is very difficult.
Imho, one of the issues is that Georgetown is a Catholic university.
Yes, I agree. Still, I’m shocked that a Catholic hospital would be so callous.
I would not call 8 months of free care callous. Indeed I would call it the opposite... generous.
It also sounds as though just maybe the part about the family not agreeing has more to it. Were there meeting to figure this all out, with everything laid on the table? What happened at any meetings?
IMO there should be places - run by charity, by insurance, whatever - sort of like nursing homes, but with family assisting, cheaper than hiring all professional people. Problem is, the insurance companies and various regulations have strangle holds so that things might likely have to be relaxed in order to have family come in an help care for their relatives. Could be small-ish places.
There has to be a better way to care for people who need care, but don’t need major hospital-only special care; things that family could learn to do.
I am a Catholic.......I am pretty sure the Jesuits no longer are! They don’t act it anymore.
It goes even beyond morality. When SCOTUS made its decision on Roe v. Wade, it was a direct attack on the Ten Commandments. The Supreme Court decided on that day that God was no longer necessary and that government would be the sole arbitrator of God's Commandments. (and of all things, under the guise of 'freedom of speech')
This doesn't sound like a mercy death to me. This sounds like people deciding who is to live and who is to die based on what they believe to be the monetary worth of a human life. At this rate, euthanasia will become as widely defined and acceptable as abortion.
>> The real, central point is that a helpless woman’s feeding tube was removed, for the purpose of causing her death by starvation/dehydration.
That method for hastening death is effectively killing someone through torture.
This Country has the manpower to support the necessary convalescence. But too may want their taxpayer funded pensions and retire before their first gray hair.
Are you talking about abuse by the staff?
So, basically, the hospital is ticked off about Fr. Pavone and everyone who is doing the right thing. They are playing hardball with Joseph.
Looks like they are going to put up obstacles hoping Joseph will die as they work on running out the clock.
“Everything is about money, power,”
Isn’t there a charity that could help her, and others like her?
In my small town we are always raising money for very ill people who can’t afford everything they need for their illness.
In the meantime we can help with our prayers.
I would strongly guess that with a Satan inspired group death reigns.
I read about this on Wesley J Smith’s blog. He thinks that
the family was 1. in disbelief and 2. did not know who
to contact in such an emergency. Do all of us know what
to tell someone we might meet faced with this circumstance
(the impending legal murder of a family member)? I’m
ready for some Real Life leafleting in my area if someone
can point me to a source. It’s that time of year again,
BTW.
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