Posted on 08/21/2006 3:43:35 PM PDT by wagglebee
DALLAS, Texas, August 21, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The children of a comatose woman are challenging in court the “compassionate reasons” for a Texas hospital’s decision to remove their mother’s life-saving treatment, asserting that their mother, a devout Baptist woman, never would consent to anyone but God ending her life.
On August 8, just days after 61-year-old Ruthie Webster's insurance stopped full coverage of her long-term care, the Regency Hospital’s bioethics committee in North Dallas, Texas, unanimously told the Webster family that they would discontinue life-preserving dialysis treatment for their mother within 10 days. The hospital claimed that Ruthie Webster's physician "has seen no appreciable change in your mother's medical condition" and that continued treatment was an exercise in futility.
The decision shocked family members, since their mother is not brain-dead, but comatose, and has been making slow progress, breathing now on her own without a ventilator, ever since she suffered a bad reaction after undergoing kidney dialysis in June rendering her mostly unresponsive. The family, however, has said their mother told them to take care of her in such a situation, saying that she believes only God has the right to take life away.
"My mom spent her life in the church. She always felt like, 'Who are we to decide? God decides,'” said Lacresia Webster on Thursday. "If this is the way she's going to be, she's still my mom. I'm not giving up on her."
However, the Regency Hospital board defends its decision citing a 1999 statute in Texas' Health and Safety Code that gives a hospital’s ethics committee the last word about continuing a patient's care. Under the law, if the ethics committee decides to end a patient’s medical care, including life-saving treatment, a family has only 10 days to transfer to another medical facility that will care for the patient.
Although Regency has offered to help find another medical facility for Ruthie Webster in Atlanta or Indiana, the family does not want to move their mother, unless they can help it.
"I find it hard to believe this is a law, because you're basically saying if this person is a burden to someone, let's just kill them, and that's unacceptable," Lacresia Webster told Dallas’s NBC 5.
"When God is ready for her, God will take her, not anyone else," Lacresia Webster vowed.
Intent on keeping this vow, Lacresia and her family have enlisted the aid of pro-bono attorneys who have filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott challenging the constitutionality of the state's “end-of-life” law. The family then won a temporary restraining order imposed on Regency Hospital to keep Ruthie Webster alive there until a hearing set for August 28.
Robert Bennet, a lawyer for the Websters said the law “allows a doctor to completely ignore what I’ve told them I wanted to do.” He added, “Mrs. Webster was a Baptist. She told her daughters very clearly that God would take her when it's her time to go. This statute violates her freedom of religion."
"My mother, she's breathing on her own, just like you and I are today," said Helena Webster Hill, who lives in Atlanta. "As long as she's fighting to live, we believe we ought to stand with her and fight with her."
How much money is spent at this hospital caring for illegal immigrants?
I'd like to see a little bit of growth and maturity in this forum, and that growth and maturity means we can discuss medical decisions and medical issues without comparing every single case and every single patient to Terri Schiavo.
This is not Terri. To continue to bring her up as THE beginning and end of all medical ethics would be like a political movement who could discuss NOTHING except in the context of the Nixon/Kennedy debate. That was but one debate between two men who touched politics for a time. In the larger scheme of things, it will not guide us well into the future to not listen and learn from other men and women who both went before and came after them.
My mother has made it clear to me verbally and in writing, I am never to pull the plug on her ever. She swears she will come back and haunt me every day of my life.
I hope that I will be able to follow her wishes in today's culture of "doing what is good RIGHT now."
thanks
Well said!
My husband and I were talking about someone who died a few years back. I made the observation to him that when Jesus walked the earth, even he didn't raise everyone. We know he had the power to do so.
You supported Terri Schiavo's dehydration too, correct?
That was my initial thought.
Maybe her dialysis problem last June was God calling her home, and man's machines have kept her alive against His will.
That's another way of looking at it.
I'm just glad I'm not in the shoes of the family or the doctors.
You just can't get off the Terri as the subject, can you?
I am sure you love your mother as I did mine, but that is one hell of a guilt trip to lay on a family member, and on society that will pick up the tab when all your resources are exhausted.
FarmerW asks some seemingly simple questions at 107, but I'm starting to wonder what some FReepers think the answers to those questions are?
I'd bet a negligible amount, in the emergency room.
All those non-emergency cases are referred to Parkland, the Dallas county hospital.
Does that mean you supported her death by dehydration and don't want to admit it now?
That is something I wonder about. We can all pass judgment from a distance, but it's a little more difficult up close and personal.
My biggest challenge to those ardent Terri cultists, is where exactly does the faith come into play. They seem to align themselves as people of faith, but the emphasis is not on whether God can raise the dead, but whether somebody can pull a plug. through it all, the supporters agree the gum;t should foot the bills.
My God raised Lazarus from dead. He stank, according to the statements of witnesses, but came out of the grave to sit with Jesus. Blind received sight, and lame walked, among the followers of Jesus. Some people think He stayed on the cross!
It means its time to stop talking about Terri every time there is a medical ethics thread.
Just a guess but some insurance has a cap on what it will pay out over a lifetime. Nowadays hospitalization is so expensive if you have 1 or 2 million $ cap you may be SOL at a bad time.
Why Texas RTL supported it is beyond amazing!
Why don't you want to talk about her? Didn't you advocate her death? Aren't you proud of that or what?
Sadly, it's doubtful.
I wonder how long Texas has been picking on people who are on dialysis. Dialysis didn't used to be considered extraordinary measures.
This is probably all anyone needs to know about "bioethics."
It isn't a culture of death, so much as it's a culture of the other guy's death. Qui bono?
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