Free Republic

Editor's Note: This is the third in a series of seven columns first posted on the Illinois Right to Life Committee's (IRLC) website [http://www.illinoisrighttolife.org/] written by Bill Beckman, IRLC's executive director. The column discusses "futile care," a method of medical evaluation whereby a physician makes the decision on whether a patient is "worthy" of life-saving treatment. This column warns readers of the need to monitor the care given to loved ones. Beckman tells a heart-breaking, but true story which, for a time, ended happily, but could have concluded in disaster with the induced premature death of Andrea Clark. The IRLC...

FORT WORTH, TEXAS, May 22, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Peruvian man whose American doctors reportedly sought to starve and dehydrate him to death was spared Wednesday after the family alerted the Peruvian media and a pro-life Texas attorney intervened in the case. According to Peruvian media reports, Jesus Sanchez, 56, had been in a coma for over five months in John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, after suffering a heart attack after a soccer game.  After the hospital's board of ethics reviewed his case, his condition was pronounced "irreversible".  The hospital announced that it would deprive Sanchez of food and...

A Winnipeg case currently winding its way to its grim conclusion pits the children of Samuel Golubchuk against doctors at the Salvation Army Grace General Hospital. According to the pleadings, Golubchuk's doctors informed his children that their 84-year-old father is "in the process of dying" and that they intended to hasten the process by removing his ventilation, and if that proved insufficient to kill him quickly, to also remove his feeding tube. In the event that the patient showed discomfort during these procedures, the chief of the hospital's ICU unit stated in his affidavit that he would administer morphine. Golubchuk...

This is the title of an article in the current issue of Forbes. It is written by John J. Parris: Jesuit Priest and Professor of Bioethics at Boston College. The article starts with a problem. In 1999 a patient was admitted with Lou Gehrig's disease. The patient indicated she should be kept alive until she could no longer enjoy her family. She eventually became unresponsive. Her daughter refused the hospital's wish to terminate life support. A lengthy (10 month) court battle ensued. The daughter opposed but eventually was faced with the hospital taking the position (Court approved) that the daughter...

LifeNews.com Note: Texas Right to Life is one of the leading pro-life groups in the state and has been working overtime to modify a futile care law. It gives families just 10 days to find medical care for their loved ones after a medical facility determines a patient's case is futile.   The journey to reform Texas’ Futile Care Law, Texas Right to Life’s number one priority for the 80th Texas Legislative Session, was a challenging and often embittered battle that ended in a disappointing stalemate in the House. However, the efforts of hundreds of activists, including families whose ailing...

Austin, TX (LifeNews.com) -- A bill the Texas legislature that would have helped patients and their families left out in the cold by medical facilities died this legislative session. However, lawmakers, pro-life groups and disability rights advocates are still keeping tabs on the futile care situation where hospitals and quit treating patients after 10 days. The Texas House defeated the futile care bill and measures limiting abortions last week as it wound down its session. The futile care measure would have increased the 10-day window to 21 days under which families could find a new medical facility to treat a...

Texas law may change to grant families some of doctors' authority On June 10, 2006, aging and ailing, Edith Pereira was taken by ambulance from St. Dominic nursing home to Memorial Hermann Hospital. It might have been nothing that serious. Urinary-tract infections had sent the 91-year-old with Alzheimer's and diabetes to the hospital often in the previous year, and the St. Dominic's nursing staff thought that likely was the problem this time. But Memorial Hermann doctors found no infection. Instead, they said, her altered state — high blood sugar that made her too drowsy and combative to be fed —...

Wesley J. Smith blogs about the recommended guidelines adopted by a Bioethics think tank in Great Britain in light of the British Medical Society's coming out in favor of euthanizing disabled newborns. The good thing is that the think tank disagrees with the concept of euthanizing newborns. The bad part is this: "The Council also suggested that infants born at 22 weeks gestation or earlier not be given intensive care unless as part of medical experiments. At age 23 weeks, it urges that no intensive care be given unless insisted upon by the parents and doctors agree. At 24 weeks...

***This is a story about a baby born at 23 weeks*** Today Emmie-Rose’s Hospital has hit a major blow against us. I believe some of the staff believe we are not providing the correct care for her and had us meet with the “Ethics” committee. At most hospitals the Ethics committee is usually made up of staff, social workers, clergy, and parents of other children. We had a room full of the staff, 1 surgeon, 2 social workers, and Stephanie and I. Let’s just stack all the cards against us. After wasting 2 hours going over the issues, it is...

Editor's Note: This is the third in a series of columns first posted on the Illinois Right to Life Committee's (IRLC) website [http://www.illinoisrighttolife.org/] written by Bill Beckman, IRLC's executive director. The RFFM.org re-posting of the column discusses "futile care," a method of medical evaluation whereby a physician makes the decision on whether a patient is "worthy" of life-saving treatment. This column warns readers of the need to monitor the care given to loved ones. Beckman tells a heart-breaking, but true story which, for a time, ended happily, but could have concluded in disaster with the induced premature death of Andrea...

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...

BOSTON (Reuters) - About two-thirds of cardiac arrest patients taken to hospitals by emergency medical technicians die anyway, and probably most could be declared dead at the scene, according to research published on Wednesday. The report in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that certain emergency medical services -- not those staffed by paramedics -- could ease the distress of loved ones and dramatically reduce the number of hopeless but expensive hospital trips. The assessment of 1,240 cardiac arrest rescue runs over two years in Ontario, Canada, found that only 1 in 500 people survived to be discharged from...

DALLAS A mother fighting to keep her baby on life support, despite a hospital's determination that her efforts would be futile, will get two more weeks to find a facility that will take the 10-month-old. A judge had been set to decide tomorrow whether to grant a temporary injunction to stop Children's Medical Center in Dallas from removing Daniel Wayne Cullen the Second from life support. But attorneys for the boy's mother and the hospital agreed yesterday to extend a temporary restraining order for another two weeks. Attorney Brian Potts, who represents the boy's mother, Dixie Belcher, said he plans...

Odd political bedfellows working together to change law that allows doctors to withdraw treatment, transfer patients Monday, May 08, 2006 Some unlikely political bedfellows want to change the state's "medical futility" law, saying it gives doctors too much power to make life-and-death decisions and families who disagree too little time to fight back. The law has received renewed attention in recent days after doctors in Austin and Houston sought to withdraw treatment from patients whose families wanted to keep them on life support. A collection of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, Texas Right to Life members and disability rights...

On June 13th, I will have been a physician for twenty five years. Twenty four of those years, exactly one half of my life, will have been spent as a neurologist. I would like, therefore, to state for the record, how grateful I am to have been allowed to practice as a neurologist, during this, the profession’s best of times.When I first began my neurology residency 24 years ago, the practice of neurology was described to me in the phrase “diagnose and adios”. Neurologists were great at diagnosing, based on history and physical examination, where precisely a lesion in the...

A woman television presenter who was critically injured in the Potters Bar train crash has made a miraculous recovery - nearly two years after doctors declared her brain-dead and said that she should be allowed to die. Relatives of Tanya Liu, a 34-year-old Taiwanese-born newsreader, say they were told by British doctors that she was in a persistent vegetative state after the crash in May 2002, which killed two of her friends and five other people, and left 76 injured. Doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in north London said that Ms Liu's injuries were so horrific that there was...

This is not the column I was going to write. However, it the column I must write.A young woman named Terri Schiavo [www.terrisfight.org] is on a deathwatch through court-ordered starvation and dehydration. Her death comes courtesy of the efforts of her husband, Michael Schiavo; right-to-die activists like lawyer George Felos and Dr. Ronald Cranford; judges George Greer and Richard Lazzara; and the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, which have refused to hear the case. Terri's parents want her to live, and after viewing the videos and talking to people, so do I. Up-to-date information is at www.terrisfight.org....

Mortal differences divide hospital and patient's family By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff, 9/28/2003 During her first year as a hospital patient, Barbara Howe "talked" with doctors, nurses, and her three daughters by pointing to letters on an alphabet board. Later, when she could no longer move, she blinked her eyes to answer questions. Now, Howe, 78, is what doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital call "locked in," a person trapped inside a body that can't breathe on its own, eat, or even say when something hurts. Howe seems able to make only one tiny movement: opening her left eye wide. But...

Increasingly across America, the sick and elderly, some with terminal illnesses, are being murdered simply by withholding food and water. When a new edition of his book "Forced Exit, The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder" was published, author Wesley J. Smith couldn’t have known that America was so far down that slope that Florida courts were ordering the killing, in a most barbaric way, of a disabled but conscious woman. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and an attorney and consultant for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, wrote the first version...