Baby Joseph battles
The hospital involved in this sad story is representing itself as allowing the family’s wishes to take their child home to die there instead of in the stark atmosphere of the medical facility. And some news stories have reported that the parents are getting their wish, after all. Not exactly true…
Here’s the most thorough account at the moment.
…the hospital where Joseph is being kept said it is willing to send him home, but with an important catch: they still refuse to perform the tracheostomy that allowed a sibling of Joseph’s who had a similar condition to live another six months at home. Instead they will simply return Joseph home, and then remove his ventilator, after which he will almost certainly die within a matter of minutes…
Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, who has been working closely with the family, told LSN that this solution is unacceptable to them…
“They need to do a tracheostomy,” said Dr. Paul Byrne, an Ohio neonatologist with nearly five decades of experience and a former president of the Catholic Medical Association. “If the baby is stable otherwise, and has a tracheostomy, then the baby can be taken care of at home.”…
Dr. Byrne called the attempt to have the state remove Joseph’s ventilator “terrible, absolutely terrible,” and insisted that in his fifty years in neonatology he’s never removed a child’s ventilator. “I’ve never seen a time to turn off a ventilator,” he said. “If a baby has a disease process that’s so bad that they’re going to die, then they die on the ventilator anyway. So you don’t have to stop the ventilator.”
This is a very important clarification of the case and the issues involved.
He also criticized the common phrase “life support,” saying, “Life is either there or it’s not there. You don’t have to hold up the life. What we do in medicine are actions … that support the vital activity of respiration.”
“Assuming doctors can do something to support the vital activities, we ought to do them,” he explained. “And a tracheostomy ought to be done, and the baby ought to continue on the ventilator.”
Further clarification…
Though doctors have said Joseph is in a “vegetative state,” Dr. Byrne called it a “made-up term” similar to the notion of “brain death,” which he said was invented “simply to get beating hearts for transplantation.”
Even Joseph’s doctor in London has admitted that the tracheostomy could prolong his life. “A tracheotomy would likely provide for a longer period of life, however, in our view would not result in improvement of well-being and could reduce quality of life,” Dr. Douglas Fraser told the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board in January.
Key phrases there, the baby’s “well-being” as seen “in our view,” that of hospital panels and government boards. That’s the scenario we’re all facing, increasingly, with health care rationing. The “quality of life” calculus doesn’t account for the sanctity of life.
