This child will die without treatment. The law has never allowed parents to decide to let their child die without treatment. A person can make that decision for himself or herself, but not for a minor.
These cases pop up every once in a while. Often, because the parents stupidly decide to use some “alternative” therapy and refuse evidence-based medicine, by the time the case is resolved, the disease has already progressed too far to be treatable.
See #7. Are you in favor of ceding authority to the hospital, “guardian” or government to make decisions on behalf of all minors diagnosed with potentially terminal illnesses? Do you have any concerns about the same logic being used to end life? Who’s to say in the future what will be deemed “alternative”? What if the “evidence-based” conclusion is to euthenize?
I don’t know... I can see both sides. I can’t help but feel torn here.
“This child will die without treatment. The law has never allowed parents to decide to let their child die without treatment. A person can make that decision for himself or herself, but not for a minor.”
The law allows it all the time if the parents don’t have the money for the treatment. Not only that, the law specifically allows, yes even encourages, the killing of un-born offspring if the woman feels she may be inconvenienced in the least.
As to whether this kid will die without “treatment” we don’t know IMHO. People are cured through faith sometimes. Probably more often than we will ever know... To that there is no doubt in my mind.
If it were my kid, I wouldn’t trust my faith enough, but that’s just me. Sorry to have to say it, but I would want a plan “B”.
At any rate, not trusting the parents to make these decisions and turning it over to the state is a slippery slope that perhaps we should not go down...
Absolutely correct. The parents do not have the right to deny their child a potentially life-saving treatment.
I understand the concerns of people who feel that it's just another step to the point at which the government begins to dictate everything that happens to your child, but this really is a very different situation.
That said, it is conceptually very complicated. As a doc I have to acknowledge that medical opinions are clearly not always right, and I could see a situation arising in which a treatment is ‘mainstream’, but actually harmful (e.g. we killed George Washington by bleeding him). I think any case in which physicians feel it is imperative to override parental wishes has to be very carefully considered and reviewed by a ‘non-government’ private board of those knowledgeable enough to make a very informed decision.
Hodgkin's lymphoma, for example, is absolutely curable, with very high success rates. To withhold chemo from a child with Hodgkin's is very much interpretable as murder. On the other hand, if a specific live virus vaccine were developed and mandated by government for all schoolchildren, and the parents were legitimately concerned about exposure to this new live virus vaccine, I would have a very hard time accepting forced vaccination.